VARENA- Green Building
BREEAM-in-use certification success: The integrally designed SES shopping center is a pioneer in the D-A-CH region and the highest-rated existing building in Austria.
The Upper Austrian shopping center VARENA can now call itself “a green building pioneer amongst all the shopping centers of the German-speaking region” and “the best-rated BREEAM existing building in Austria”. The center, which was integrally designed by ATP, outperformed all other office, industrial and retail buildings in Germany, Austria and Switzerland with its “excellent” rating in the “operational management” category. In the building performance category it was rated “very good”.
“We are delighted about this excellent evaluation”, was the reaction to the results of Mag. Marcus Wild, Chairman of the Management Board of SES Spar European Shopping Centers. “We demand a lot from our centers which are, in any case, already built and operated to a very high quality. In the VARENA Shopping Center we also developed and implemented innovative technologies together with the architects.”
The BREEAM sustainability standard is the leading and most widely spread certification method for buildings and addresses categories such as management, energy, water, environment, health and comfort, waste, materials, transport and ground and ecology. According to the auditor, Jens Glöggler from ATP sustain, “BREEAM-in-use building certification assesses the overall performance of existing buildings and works for the continuous improvement of the property over a period of time. The set of criteria used offers managers and operators an ideal platform for recognizing optimization potential and triggering improvement measures.”
In the field of sustainability VARENA is just one of many successful Green Buildings to emerge from the integrated studios of ATP: In 2009 the ICSC named the ATRIO shopping center in Villach the world’s most sustainable shopping center. The “eco shopping center”, the G3 Shopping Resort in Gerasdorf by Wien which opened in 2012 received a “very good” BREEAM design certificate in 2013. In 2008 a Hilti production building was used as a pilot project for ÖGNI certification in Austria and received a silver rating, despite already having been completed. And the aspern IQ technology center in Vienna opened in 2012 as Austria’s first Plus Energy office building.
