The E2REBUILD demonstration in Roosendaal, the Netherlands, consists of 112 identical, single family terrace houses built in 1960 in the area of Kroeven. The whole area underwent a transformation, which included renovation of existing houses and new construction. The retrofit of 50 of the houses was part of the E2REBUILD project and was completed at the beginning of 2011.

The renovation in the Roosendaal pilot buildings took place with the tenants remaining in their homes throughout the entire renovation work, which required consideration from both sides and continuous dialogue.

The pilot building in Oulu, Finland is one of five student apartment buildings with communal facilities in a housing cooperation. The building was completed in 1985 according to a Finnish industrialised building system developed in the 1970s, using prefabricated concrete units for residential buildings, called the BES system. The building was in need of a complete refurbishment and reconfiguration to new-built standards.

The E2REBUILD demonstration in Munich, Germany consisted of two blocks of residential multi-storey buildings in the suburb of Sendling, built in 1954. The buildings, owned by the public housing company GWG München, represented uniform standard blocks built in the post-war decade of the 1950s to fulfil urgent housing needs, with three storeys and accessed by inner staircases. The resources were quite poor concerning material, construction and design, resulting in a lack of variability, technical facilities, daylight and comfort inside the buildings.

The E2REBUILD demonstration in Halmstad, Sweden is a multi-storey building from 1963 with the typical features of that period, such as a reinforced concrete load-bearing frame and facade elements. The building contains 91 apartments. The retrofit included a complete exchange of main pipes (water and sewage) as well as new kitchens and bathrooms, energy-efficient measures such as new, highly insulated windows, improved adjustments of control systems, new high performance extraction air, new outdoor air heat pumps and increased airtightness.

The E2REBUILD demonstration site in Augsburg (southern Germany) consists of two multi-storey residential buildings with typical post-war characteristics from 1966. The buildings are a three-storey block with 12 apartments and a six-storey block with 48 apartments. They have been fully retrofitted including building services and bathrooms, with residents remaining in their apartments during the construction work.

The Norwegian demo site of the SCHOOL OF THE FUTURE is known as Brandengen Primary School. It is situated in a housing area in the outskirts of Drammen, 40 km southwest from the capital city of Norway. The school’s facilities consist of three brick buildings linked together with arcades – the main building, the activity building for gym, arts and crafts, and a small building for leisure time. The buildings, designed by the famous Norwegian architect Arnstein Arneberg, are of historical value.

Hedegaards School is located in Ballerup, Denmark, in a cold temperate climate. The school is positioned in a relatively open urban area with mainly low-rise buildings and is one of 10 schools in the town. In this area, the annual mean temperature has increased from 8 °C in 1980 to 8.7 °C today. The number of heating degree days is 2900 and the number of hours with bright sunshine is about 1700 – this has also increased over the last 30 years from about 1500 hours.

The Tito Maccio Plauto School, which was part of the SCHOOL OF THE FUTURE project, is located in Cesena in north-east Italy, close to the Adriatic Sea. The school, built in the 1960s, is an L-shaped building on three levels with a basement, part of which is used for music labs and the canteen. It has classrooms, labs, an administration area and a music hall, as well as a gym adjacent to the main building. The building hosts about 400 pupils and 40 to 50 teachers and caretakers.

The aim of the SCHOOL OF THE FUTURE project was to design, demonstrate, evaluate and communicate shining examples of how to achieve the high-performance building of the future with a focus on school buildings. One of the project’s demonstration sites was the Solitude-Gymnasium, which is located in the north-west of Stuttgart, the capital of the federal state Baden-Württemberg (south-western Germany).

Tepebaşı is a municipality located in Eskişehir in the mid-western side of Anatolia with a population of 320 000. Yaşamköyü is a district of approximately 30 000 m2 with a built area of just under 10 000 m2. The area was built on 2007 by TOKI, the governmental organisation responsible for mass housing in Turkey. Although relatively newly built, similar to most buildings built before the Energy Efficiency Law that came into force recently, the district building stock consists of inefficiently constructed buildings in energy consumption terms.