SonnenCityProjekte - Energy++Buildings by SonnenCityProjekte

Dear Jury and Commentators – our answers to your questions, statements and suggestions: First of all we would like to thank you for the very constructive criticism you have offered us, which shows us, which parts we have to edit and improve and translate better from German to English. We realize how difficult it is to translate complex and holistic concepts in a simple and understandable way into a different language. In total we do feel understood in our ideas. We are representatives of a diverse, active and individual CityDesign based on the tradition of the historical growth to be an alternative for the 'Modern city of the 20th century'. We see one of the deeper reasons of our global energy problem in the drastic growth of our cities: the once necessary separation of structures, social standings and culture in the city itself nowadays lead to a huge -and often unnecessary- traffic volume. Statistics and economic surveys have proven that regarding the worldwide energy input of economy policy the topics of city growth and traffic cover 50%-75% of said input. That is the reason we try to set mixed building structures as our top priorities, to help support a more fluent traffic and reduce the energy used by it, which is why our focus lies upon a vast variety of target groups for users and owners: we are convinced that a reasonable combination of buildings within the city can help lighten the traffic, without constricting its inhabitants in their mobility. Your question concerning Level 3 refers to our determination, not to see every object on its own but to combine it synergetically with many other construction techniques, economic parameters and social requirements. Only with the synergetic combination it is possible for us to use energy benefits to their full potential: e.g. areal proximity can help lessen the energy used for mobility. The collective energy production can help to strengthen the social structures to the out- and inside, which would lead to an imitation effect, which in turn would lead to further social, cultural and 'demographic' bridges in our society. We were also very pleased that you immediately recognized the restrictions the regulation in most European city centers would put upon our concepts, opposing it, even if politics demand our procedure. Of course it is a huge step and task to adapt the communal city regulations for construction, but we have developed an economic concept, which would allow said adaption of regulations without larger financial expenses for the respective councils. Concerning your request about our way of building with solid wood we would like to point to the homepage of construction companies specialized on solid wood: … Of course we are very well aware of the fact that our resources of wood are limited and can only be managed to a limited extent. If theoretically we globally used nothing but solid wood for all our future buildings, we would very quickly face the problem of lacking wood for them. That is why we do not only fancy one single technique, being interested in a synergetic procedure of SunCityProjects. In some points we would like to contradict our jurors: In our opinion it is absolutely no utopic idea to allow the users to have an influence on the design of their surrounding, no, on the contrary, it belongs to the basic needs of the majority of people in this world. Unfortunately it is only possible for inhabitants of suburbs to satisfy this need in a way. We are the ones to foster this direct, immediate participation right from the beginning. The vendees can design their own surrounding themselves. Therein the vendees design the texture of their architecture, what they do not design, however, is the common construction. The jurors have brought up the question, why the use of electrical vehicles should reduce the traffic. We would like to highlight that by no means the use of electric vehicles reduces the traffic. We aim at significantly reducing the traffic by an adequate mixture of urban construction. It is only for the additional “rest of traffic” that we consider it a sensible thing to reduce the waste of fossil fuels by means of electric vehicles. We do not postulate the inhabitants to be homogenous in the way of always getting along with each other perfectly, sitting together peacefully to sort out the issues together…no, on the contrary, we base our ideas on the real situation we human beings dwell in: everyone has got his property, his limited views – inside and outside…and for the additional communication with the surrounding we offer adequate communicative areas in front of the houses that invite but not oblige to communicate. We have consolidated this the following way in our logo: handing over bearable personal responsibility + linking renewable energies + living together independently in communities = protecting resources. With great pleasure we would like to bring forth more transparency to our jurors as to the question, in how far the diverse innovative and new, partly expensive technologies can sustainably reduce the costs of investment and the operating costs, although we want to yield an energy gain with our buildings… Indeed, though, every calculation is based on the fact that every construction of building has got a focus of its own depending on its geographical position and on the purpose it is supposed to fulfill. As to this we would like to frankly explain that both our buildings and the parcel of land usually are significantly more expensive than comparable buildings per square meters of effective area outside the city. Like this we make use of the parcel of land more efficiently offering a house with a garden hidden from view in the middle of the city: We included the daily costs for trips… - also repeated trips – that can quickly sum up to costs of some hundreds of Euros per month, if a house were built away from the city – …we included these costs into the monthly financial burden of a user of our house, thus always gaining housing space with a significantly lower monthly burden. An additional effect of our City Sun Houses is the fact that their inhabitants have significantly more spare time daily. We presume that the period of amortisation will take between 10 and 15 years for the technique we use and with the currently low energy prices. As our technique which rather represents a low technique is little maintenance intensive and does not tend to easily fail, this means for the ones owning it that after five years already the energy will be free of charge. As we are convinced that the first thing our customers decide about are the costs, the “ecological rest” ranging in the second place, we have made up our mind to provide the marketing of our houses on two levels, where appropriate: We offer the house itself for the end user to a comparable price (to the one outside the city) and the technique of energy as an energy fee due for monthly pay basing on a price equal to the market price frozen for ten years. Our technique is a proven one, what is new, is the massive, concentrated, synergetic and autarchic application in the middle of the city, different and characteristic for each single project.