Sustainable Campus to Support the Development of AI

Thornton Tomasetti is part of the winning team led by Dutch architecture firm MVRDV selected to design Innovation Park Artificial Intelligence (Ipai) in Heilbronn, Germany. Positioned as a campus for the development of AI technologies, Ipai will incorporate laboratories, an innovation center for start-ups, housing, a community center and a range of supporting amenities.

The 265,000 m² campus aims to compete with tech hubs like Silicon Valley in California and Shenzhen, China. The master plan takes on the bold form of a circle, intended to be visible from satellite images. While most of the buildings feature rectangular forms, the communications center is a round tower on the central plaza.

Thornton Tomasetti is providing master planning services, sustainability consulting, resilience design, structural design and façade engineering services to MVRDV for the project, which is being developed for a consortium led by the municipality of Heilbronn and the Dieter Schwarz Foundation.

With a focus on sustainable design, the campus will consume 80% less energy than a typical campus of the same size. Stand-out features include bioclimatic facades, energy storage via batteries and ground-based heat and cold storage. Over the course of its lifespan, Ipai is projected to be 100% carbon neutral.

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