What will the first building without heating or air conditioning in Lyon look like?

The building materials ensure inertia while the ventilation, shutters and windows will be activated by a computer.

A virtuous building. The “22 26” building will require neither heating nor air conditioning and will maintain a temperature between 22 and 26 degrees in all seasons. This is the promise of the real estate developer Nexity, which presented on Thursday 12 September his project in Lyon, in the Confluence district. This type of building already exists in Austria, but it is the first in France. It is bioclimatic architecture and the occupants will have to learn to live with it.

From the outside, the terracotta bricks surrounding the building are clearly visible. These honeycomb bricks will capture the air and provide insulation. This building called “22-26” is presented by Mathieu Blot of Nexity: “The inertia is brought into the building by double brick walls. Next to the windows, we have small shutters that will open and close very gently to guarantee quality air in the home and at the same time limit the air supply which is a bit of an enemy when we want to control the temperature inside buildings.”

The ancestral concepts are combined with technology. “It’s one sensor per room, one computer and one tablet in each room, explains Mathias Bernhardt, architect at the Baumschlager Eberle agency. You press it, the window opens and after a quarter of an hour, the computer takes back control. It either keeps the window open if necessary, or it closes it.”

The developer has nevertheless planned to connect the housing to district heating in the event of misuse of the system by its occupants, who will be trained.“It’s another way of using your home,” underlines Mathieu Blot of Nexity. And to slide:

“We will have to not open the windows when we might want to and let the automatisms take place.”

And the occupants will make savings, that is the primary objective. “We are at less than 9 KWh per m² per year, explains architect Mathias Bernhardt, we reduce the cost by 4 to 5 times on this part.” And besides, the 24 housing units were sold under real solidarity leases to low-income households so that they could access property in a city, Lyon, under real estate pressure. Another building on the same model will be built in La Garenne-Colombes, in Hauts-de-Seine.