Future places - future buildings

How will we live and work in the future?

Above all, there is a clear trend towards urbanisation. As a result, the need for smart cities will grow. These are resource-conserving, energy-efficient, ecologically progressive cities with a high quality of life.

What will life be like in such a smart city?

Increasingly resilient neighbourhoods will emerge, as can already be seen in Vienna, for example. This means that distances are short. Workplace, home, kindergarten, doctor and school - everything will be interlinked. One particular challenge here is load optimisation across buildings for more efficient use of renewable energy systems. A further trend can be observed in the area of sensor-supported installation, operation and comfort optimisation.

Does this mean that buildings are becoming more intelligent?

That's right. You can certainly take a leaf out of the automotive industry's book here. The building of the future will be equipped with intelligent sensor systems, automatically recognise potential for optimisation in operational management and automatically sound the alarm if problems occur.

What can you imagine by this?

Even during the construction process, the building can provide well-founded decision-making support in the event of impending construction defects. Or it can warn us of impending mould. Many things are possible. But one thing is certain: the building of the future poses major challenges for both building technology and information and communication technology.

Thank you.

Christian Heschl specialises in research and teaching: building technology, sorption technology, thermodynamics, heat and mass transport, computational fluid dynamics (CFD). More about our expert, his research specialisations and publications here.