Catch-up Time: Tour Pictures

I have now recovered a bit from the 10 continuous work/activity days of the most dynamic learning experience I have ever been involved with - what a treat!  I must say that this ole brain with its 600+TB hard drive has been a bit reformated, defragged and gotten a little higher access speed.

Here are a few pictures from the past week's Tuesday tours with explanations:
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The first few pictures are from Bad Aiblingen (see my  Blog http://eurolearn12.blogspot.com/2012/01/vision-realized-cmg-community-microgrid.html)

This wooden house is an example of a European sustainable all-wood construction technique.  To the far right there are 100% round logs attached to the siding, then 1/2 round logs, then 1/4 round logs as one moves toward the left, and then square boards.
Here's the official german  write-up (google translated):

At the World Ski Championships in Winter 2011 the wooden pavilion standing in the pedestrian zone in Garmisch is reminiscent of a ''pile of wood" in its design and shape. That was the challenge for the students of the Institute for Architecture and Urbanism of the University of Biberach: the classic wood house should be re-interpreted. Under the direction of Prof. Matthias Loebermann, the students were show the various forms  of wooden building material: from the tree trunk to the planed wooden section. The pavilion was built within the main topic "Experimental Build" and was of the Bavarian Forest Minister Helmut Brunner with the "Timber Price Bavaria 2010". The research project is thus one of the outstanding timber buildings in Bavaria.  this house was once the wooden station for ticket sales in the Garmisch Winter 2011 Games and served as a focal point for information about the World Cup.

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This is FHS Rosenheim's entry into the USA Solar Decathlon competition.  You can read and see more inside details of it here (click on this).   Very cool sliding steel louvers which where computer controlled to let in maximum daylight and heating/cooling.  The top of the house is covered with solar (both thermal + PV) collectors.

yours truly...
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Here's the entire group (Masters Students, Teachers, Coaches, tour guides, etc) at LilienHof in downtown Munich.  The apartments behind us are the 'LilienHof' zero-energy buildings (ZEB) as described on the link here. These apartments' energy retrofits are heavily subsidized by the german government, and have plenty of support in R+D projects from the Fraunhofer Institute (yeah - the same guys that invented the mp3 format).  My own thoughts were that the mechanical rooms had a bit too much hi-technology in them, and there would be a lot of maintenance and upkeep on such sophisticated technology.  It contained one of the world's first large geothermal heat pumps driven directly by warm ground water.

Our last stop after LiLienHof was at Ernst+Young with an urban rail-yard redevelopment process where I was reacquainted with how the lucky 1% get to leverage 4% of their money into a 17% return.
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And here's a couple pictures of our international coaching and coordination team (along with some Norwegian students) and the last one: yours truly in the middle of a student advisement session (gee, am I really losing that much hair :-)??