The building of the future looks like a very small house, especially when it is seen directly next to Munich’s enormous trade fair halls. It was built on the outdoor space at the Bau 2011 trade fair. Rosenheim University excelled with this building at the Solar Decathlon Europe university competition and achieved a highly respected second place in the competition’s ten architectural disciplines. The "people’s winner” in Madrid also proved to be a real crowd-puller in Munich, attracting both trade professionals and lay people alike.

More than 7,000 trade visitors from all over the world inspected the house and were shown round it by the Rosenheim decathletes. The energy-plus building’s distinguishing feature is its innovative, serrated facade, which can be continuously adjusted from the ground to the eaves and thus redefines solar protection and daylight control as issues. The modular wooden frame construction system with specially developed wood-to-steel adhesive bonds is also a Rosenheim innovation. The building is predominantly cooled using passive measures, whereby a film of water is directed across the gently sloping solar modules on the roof during the cool hours of the night. By means of thermal radiation and evaporative cooling, the water is cooled by up to 10 kelvin and is then collected in a storage tank. The cooling ceiling system is operated with this water during the day.

The starting point for the guided tours was a trade fair stand in neighbouring Hall C4, where the EnOB research initiative presented itself together with the organiser of the Solar Decathlon Europe 2010, the Spanish Ministry of Housing. The four German entrants in the competition – the universities from Stuttgart, Wuppertal, Berlin and, of course, Rosenheim University of Applied Sciences as the best-placed competitor, showed models of their buildings, provided small presentations and videos, and answered many questions about the visionary building prototypes.