Provinciehuis Antwerp

The new passive Provincial Government Administrative Office ‘Provinciehuis” in Antwerp is designed from a sustainable perspective. Thanks to pre-design collaboration and multidisciplinary expertise it was possible to combine the challenging architecture with extensive sustainability elements without compromising aesthetics.

As a result, the building is passive certified, signifying that the buildings net demand for heating and cooling is minimized to a bare minimum, only by optimizing the building’s shape, orientation, facades, etc. The building contains open offices, individual offices, one auditorium for 350 occupants and another one for 100 occupants, an industrial kitchen including a restaurant for 200 guests, a fitness room, a data center, a library and an underground parking lot.

One of the largest BTES fields in Belgium

An extensive field, containing 350 geothermal boreholes is installed below the underground parking, which provides the primary energy supply to the building. During winter, heat pumps extract their warmth out of the ground, and in this way, store the cold that is applied for passive cooling during summer. The system for distribution throughout the building exists primarily out of concrete core activation, completed with a few zones of floor heating. These low-temperature systems render an ideal efficiency of the heat pumps and passive cooling.

The hygienic ventilation is demand-driven according to the buildings air quality in the different zones. Even the heat from the industrial kitchen extractor hoods is recovered thanks to a degreasing process with UV lights.

Plenty of daylight combined with high-performance LED

The office lighting utilizes high-performance LED appliances that can be individually programmed for more flexibility. The daylight control system reduces the consumption further by using light fixtures that dim by responding to the daylight luminance values (light intensity values) and occupancy (presence detectors) in any given space. The roof is optimally covered with PV panels for the production of green power.

Breeam Excellent Certified

To obtain this certification the following tasks were executed as for climatization and energy consumption.

• Thermal comfort study: According to the provided requirements of the related BREEAM-credit, we made a dynamic calculation of the indoor temperatures that will occur in the usable spaces of the Provinciehuis. Based on the hourly results, we formed an image of the to be expected indoor comfort during an entire typical year. With this reference, it was possible to do a numerical evaluation that determined whether or not the credit could be obtained.
• Daylight calculation: According to the provided requirements of the related BREEAM-credit, we made a daylight calculation concerning all spaces within the Provinciehuis, to assure a sufficient amount of daylight would enter each of the spaces, making them more comfortable during the day and decreasing the energy demand related to artificial lighting.
• Evaluation Low and Zero Carbon technologies (LZC): According to the provided requirements of the related BREEAM-credit, we made an evaluation of the effectiveness of the applied low or zero carbon technologies. More specifically, we examined the ground source heat pumps and considered to what extent they will reduce the CO2 emissions of the project on a long term basis. For this purpose, the installation was compared with a classic installation for similar buildings, showing that the gain in CO2 emissions was big enough to even receive the full amount of credits and the additional innovation credit for this building.