Change your underwear

[Margaret and Rijk Rietveld]

Twelve years ago, the City of Nieuwegein wanted to be the "greenest" town in the Netherlands. They tightened the national standards by 10% and required every new project to prove that it would be better than the, at the time, relatively strict energy code required.

It is not difficult to minimize building openings and to make the glass very reflective, but the trick is, that you try to make a design as transparent as possible, and still be more energy efficient than a normal building. It led to several innovative solutions. Here are a few pages from our proposal that we worked out with Peutz (www.peutz.nl), the famous building physics consultants.