New building on the UN Campus officially handed over to the United Nations in Bonn
On February 10, 2022 the new building on the UN Campus was officially handed over to the United Nations in Bonn. The head of the Liaison Office of the German Foreign Office to the United Nations Organisations in Bonn Dr. Rainer Lassig symbolically handed over the building to the head of the United Nations Volunteer Programme (UNV) Toily Kurbanov. Dr. Lassig remarked that he looks forward to the continued cooperation between Germany and the UN Bonn Campus.
The so-called 'Climate Tower' will provide 330 new workplaces to the Secretariat of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). With its 17 floors, it makes a mark in the ensemble of traditional buildings in the Bundesviertel. The building on the banks of the Rhine between the Old Waterworks and the former plenary hall of the German Bundestag is particulary sustainable and achieves the gold standard in the Sustainable Building Rating System. In 2013, the Berlin architect Stefan Lippert won the competition for the extension building on the UN Campus in Bonn. Sustainability criteria already played a significant role during the competition process and in the subsequent planning phase.
Sustainability aspects include ecological, economic, and socio-cultural components. For example, a geothermal well provides sustainable heating and cooling for the building. A so-called air-earth register and highly efficient heat recovery systems are essential elements for the energy-efficient ventilation of the building, and high demands were placed on the choice of building materials in this project in order to reduce the use of pollutants to a necessary minimum. Moreover, the flexible and thus long-term usability of the building, a high level of user comfort or high requirements for accessibility are important criteria that were taken into account at an early stage of planning.
To learn more about the new building on the UN Campus, listen to the podcast episode of Inside UN Bonn, where we speak to Stefan Lippert, the architect of the new building.