To make a building sustainable, taking into account its climatic conditions is key. No better examples than the three showcase buildings under the EU funded  DIRECTION project.

Sustainable buildings partly depend on control strategies to be energy efficient.

Carlos Bárcena, head of R&D Projects at the Spanish construction Company  DRAGADOS .

Energy efficiency has become a key objective in the current context of increasing energy demand, decreasing resources and global warming. Key to efficient energy savings, however, are users' awareness and behaviour.

The quest for energy efficiency has become a modern mantra. But developing new energy sources and production methods is not sufficient.

Katrin Lenz, an expert from the Department Life Cycle Engineering at the Fraunhofer Institute for Building Physics  (IBP), Germany, shares her view with youris.

Liberalising the heat market is, in theory, possible. It would operate in the same way that enables owners of domestic-scale wind turbines, or any other electricity producer, to sell surplus into the grid and draw power from the network.

The building sector has become much greener. To get such credentials it has adopted methods borrowed from other industries, such as life cycle analysis ( LCA ), which looks at the environmental impact of a building at every stage from its creation to its decommissioning.

Niklaus Ledergerber, president of the cultural heritage preservation commission of the Swiss canton of Appenzell, is an expert in local building history. He tells youris.

Scientists aim to create a sustainable future for the Strickbau building technique , typical of the Swiss Appenzell region. The challenge is to use modern features respecting historic architecture to bring them back from the verge of extinction.

A new Directive, dubbed the energy performance of buildings Directive (EPBD), brings the new concept of net -zero energy buildings (NZEB) meaning buildings with a zero energy balance that have a better level of energy performance than the standard energy efficiency requirements in current building codes.

It was developed under the €2.88 million EU funded Digital Environment Home Energy Management System ( DEHEMS ) project. A number of plug-in home energy monitoring meters are already available on the market.

Going from modern energy efficient houses to historic buildings must have been a big leap for you.

Window refurbishments stand out as a viable approach to dramatically reduce energy loss. As their first case of study, the project’s researchers chose to upgrade the windows of the ‘Waaghaus’ (Public Weighing House), a building located in Bolzano, Italy, that is over seven-century-old.

In 2006 the Technical Building Code (CTE) has come into force in Spain. The Code provides for a reduction of energy demand of buildings from architectural design and a reduction of conventional energy consumption through the use of solar thermal water to produce heating and photovoltaic panels to generate electricity.

Professor Claes-Göran Granqvist and colleagues at Uppsala University in Sweden have recently received about 2 million euros from the European Research Council to develop new materials making buildings more energy efficient.

In the district of Hol, located west of Oslo, a church built in 1920 was renovated to become energy efficient for as little cost as possible, while respecting its status as a historical monument.

Reducing the energy requirements of buildings is an absolute priority in Europe. The energy demonstration project SARA has developed several public-access eco-buildings in France, Italy, Slovenia, Spain, UK and Uzbekistan.

Climate change is on everyone’s lips these days and the European Union, having decided to reduce its CO2-emmissions by at least half by 2050, is no exception.

Our future depends on energy, and as households and cars currently contribute to more than 50% of all energy consumption in the EU, new energy-efficient architecture can be an important approach to bring this percentage down.