STORY: Fulfilling the dream of owning your own home and at the same time protecting the climate – this is the goal that an architectural office in Berlin wants to achieve with a sustainable building concept. A complex of 84 semi-detached and terraced houses is currently being built in the north of the federal capital. In order to reduce the CO2 footprint for the “Kokoni One” construction project, the focus is primarily on renewable raw materials and the installation of renewable energies. Architect Eike Roswag-Klinge recently explained this on site: “So we are energetically independent here thanks to our PV systems and heat pumps. And we have used as much wood and natural fibers as possible and we have avoided concrete as much as possible.” PV means photovoltaics, i.e. solar electricity. The direction is right. Because Germany must reduce its greenhouse gas emissions by 65 percent by 2030 compared to 1990. Climate neutrality should even be achieved by 2045. The bottom line is that practically no more CO2 is allowed to escape into the atmosphere. In the “Kokoni One” residential area, a local heating network with central heat pumps is part of the overall ecological building concept. And according to Roswag-Klinge, this could also be applied to terraced houses from the 1960s and 1970s, for example, by simply adding new floors made of sustainable material to the old buildings. “Well, you could easily take these houses here and put them on top, that’s a good example for the inner layers too. We can actually condense with these wooden buildings and they can then serve all these climate aspects very well if we’re in the inner cities compress it a bit. It’s actually even better than out here.” Because then no new land would be built on. And the existing transport infrastructure could be used much better. The German Institute for Economic Research also advises this. In view of the housing shortage in Germany, the federal government had actually set itself the goal of building 400,000 apartments a year. But this plan has already been revised. It was not until January that the SPD’s Federal Minister for Building, Klara Geywitz, admitted that this target would also clearly be missed in 2023.