The Building Technology Showcase is the first project of its kind in the United States. The project takes inspiration from another successful building demonstration project undertaken by the Fraunhofer Society: the Fraunhofer inHaus Center in Germany. A collaboration between 7 Fraunhofer Institutes and around 100 industrial partners, inHaus is a platform for developing, testing, and demonstrating new solutions for rooms and buildings and bringing them to market.
Beyond bringing about socially beneficial developments in areas such as energy efficiency and environmental protection, the main goal of the inHaus project is to open up new market opportunities for its industry partners. Jointly planned and operated application labs are housed in two pilot buildings: inHaus1 for the residential sector and inHaus2 for the commercial sector. These form the basis of an integrated chain of innovation from research through to application (inHaus pilot projects in the market) that significantly increases chances of success for cutting-edge techniques. Partners’ costs for complex and risky new developments are reduced by shared use of the inHaus labs and cooperative access to all the resources in the inHaus network.
In addition, the inHaus center offers consulting services, events, and training and development seminars to its clients and partners. Examples of inHaus activities range from improving energy efficiency through the use of new materials and automated building services to optimizing the design of office space and hotel rooms, and increasing security and assistance for people in care.
Work on this ambitious project started in April 2007 with support from the European Union, the German Federal Ministry for Education and Research (BMBF), the federal state of North Rhine-Westphalia (NRW) and the city of Duisburg, as well as several prominent industry partners. Version 1.0 of inHaus2 was completed in October 2008; the official opening took place on November 5, 2008.