Solar settlement Engen

44649 Herne: This is not a housing estate, but the concept could equally be applied to housing. The Naturhuset apartment house by Bengt Warne in Stockholm was one of the first pioneering buildings to implement the house-in-house principle with a shell of glass. Also the Student dormitory ESA in Kaiserslautern is built like this. The project in Herne, however, is the most spectacular of its kind in this form.
The building, designed in partnership by the German architectural firm HHS Planer & Architekten AG and the French architectural firm Jourda & Perraudin (Francoise Helene Jourda and Gilles Perraudin), is enclosed in a glass climate shell that creates a Mediterranean climate similar to that in Nice. This is on average 5 °C warmer than the outside temperature. Water features, earth channels and large gates prevent overheating in summer. The solar system in the roof, was the largest building-integrated system of its kind at the time. The supports inside are made of 56 spruce trunks. Completion: 1999