Marina Miceli
Europe Press Office,London
SolarLeaf, the world’s first bioreactive façade presented at the BIQ House, has been shortlisted for the Zumtobel Group Award 2014 in the “Applied Innovations” category.
The demonstrator, specially designed for last year’s International Building Exhibition (IBA) in Hamburg, is a four-story residential building comprising 200m2 of integrated photo-bioreactors which absorb CO2 emissions while cultivating microalgae to generate biomass and heat as renewable energy resources. The environment for photosynthesis is provided by glass photobioreactors installed on the southwest and southeast elevations.
Now that the technical feasibility of the system has been proven by the BIQ House, the consortium is working on concepts for integrating the system on a larger scale to demonstrate the commercial benefits.
The SolarLeaf was designed by Arup in collaboration with SSC Strategic Science Consult and Colt International and co-funded by ZukunftBau.
“The project became a milestone to create a new value chain and plays an important role in establishing surplus energy and zero carbon building clusters for the future.
—Jan Wurm, Arup’s Europe Research Leader
The Zumtobel Group Award honours outstanding, sustainable solutions in architecture and engineering that make a notable contribution to the quality of life for the future. For the 2014 award the "Applied Innovations" category has been added to sharpen the focus on urban developments and applied innovations in the built environment.
“With the bioreactor-façade and the integration of technical and biological cycles a new era of building construction has been marked. Colt feels honoured that SolarLeaf is shortlisted for the prestigious Zumtobel Award.
Lukas Verlage, Director at Colt
The BIQ House project competes with another four projects, and the announcement of the laureates will be held on 22 September at The Serpentine Galleries in London.