The Baden-Württemberg House opened at the Dubai Expo 2020. It showcases how design can correspond to the local site conditions and can interacts with the outdoor environment based on the dynamics of outdoor conditions. The building therefore reflects the local climatic context during the Expo Period, not as a technical add‐on, but as an integrated part of the design itself.
The core of the comfort concept is a “ColdPool” reflecting a natural desert phenomenon, where cold and dry air piles up in sand pits, as well know from valleys in the black forest. Within the building this happens in an artificial pit, cooled during the day by a thermal storage below the building, which is charged with a free cooling from the night sky through the hybrid PV system on the roof during night time. Temperatures in the cool pool stay far below the ambient temperature and offer a tempered shady outdoor area as a rest zone for the Expo visitors – emission free and energetically at zero cost. Our system implementation and evaluation on site shows the “ColdPool” is successfully working: using an infrared-camera the surface temperatures validate the approach.