Energie Quartier (Energy District)

A contribution to student ideas competition "EnergIeQuartier", 2011. The project won the 2nd prize.
The brief for the project asked for re-designing an existing Gründerzeit quartier (19th Century German urban blocks) in any German city to make it energy efficient, energy conserving, and energy productive. Gründerzeitquartiers are considered very energy inefficient by contemporary German building standards and in view of Germany’s policy to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 40% (from 1990 levels) by the year 2020, the Ministry released the competition in an effort to look for visionary ideas to retrofit such quartiers and raise their energy efficiency to current standards.

Studio designers

Eleonore Harmel, Tobias Kuttler, Maria Oikonomou, Daniel Schwab, Heinrich Sparla, Hu Xiaohan

Project description

In the project, we took the approach that the notion of energy in a Gründerzeitquartier must go far beyond energy efficiency and energy conservation. For us, energy also means the energy needed to grow and transport food to a quartier; to dispose of that food when it becomes organic waste; the energy needed to pump underground water, treat it, and circulate it for drinking in a quartier; and the energy needed for treating a quartier’s sewage. To reflect this approach, the Kreuzberg Energie Quartier aimed not only to be energy efficient, to conserve and produce energy but also to be self-reliant in terms of all its energetic needs related to producing food and water, and to dealing with waste. We also introduced in the quartier new spaces for work, leisure, and culture in order to minimize the need to travel outside the quartier.
The aesthetic dimension was also fundamental in the project. We managed to merge the infrastructural systems for dealing with energy, water, waste and food with urban design aesthetics that would enhance and preserve the quartier’s historical value. In the end, we produced an urban design project that merged old with new and with the spaces and facilities needed to accommodate sustainable infrastructure systems to produce a self-reliant Gründerzeitquartier.

Project results