Section of Building
(Graphic courtesy of Senatsverwaltung für Bau- und Wohnungswesen, Berlin, Limited cooperative contest for the exhibition hall, visitor center and document library "Topography of Terror")

This building will be located in Berlin, Germany, at the former site of the most dreaded institutions of terror during the "Third Reich": the Secrete State Police Office, the Reichsführer-SS, the Security Service of the SS, and the headquarters of the Reich Security Main Office.

The building will house the library for the documents of terror and will cover the excavation of the prison cells. The design is very modest, using only industrial glass between columns made of raw concrete. The corridors are acting as buffer zones, reducing the heat transfer from the conditioned rooms to the outside (and vice versa).

The buffer zones will have their own ventilation system equipped with ground coupling and heat recovery.

In terms of modelling the thermal behavior of the building's envelope, this construction does not produce the one-dimensional heat flow most of the thermal building simulation models can handle.

Heat flow through exterior wall (Summer case)

Therefore, a two-dimensional heat flow model was developed to handle the flow through the concrete columns. The heat transfer data obtained from the two-dimensional model was used to create an one-dimensional wall, which shows the same thermal performance as the column wall. The characteristic data for this wall were used in the thermal building simulation model DOE-2 to calculate the room temperatures and the energy consumption for conditioning.

We also performed simulations of the smoke distribution in the building and in the stairwell towers in case of a fire.

Home

This page was developed at IES by hef. Last changed on July 13, 1997
If you have any comments, please send us mail to the above address. Thanks.