Smart Living Lab to Be Built at Former Cardinal Brewery in Fribourg

A partnership agreement signed yesterday has laid the foundations for the construction of the Smart Living Lab, a building shared by EPFL, the University of Fribourg and Fribourg‘s College of Engineering and Architecture. It will be located where the Cardinal brewery used to be. Its goal is to develop the technologies that will be used for equipping the intelligent buildings of the future and to become the first paradigmatic structure of this type.

Anne-Claude Demierre, President of the Council of State of Fribourg, and Patrick Aebischer, President of EPFL, signed an agreement on 23 April. It ratified the partnership between the canton of Fribourg and EPFL in the construction of the Smart Living Lab (SLL), a new center of expertise dedicated to the technology of the intelligent buildings of the future.

Indeed, the partners behind the SLL believe that building technologies will play a leading role towards achieving the federal government’s objectives on energy savings and sustainable development. Therefore, the SLL plans to develop research projects of international scale in the fields of design and habitat use.

Located in the heart of the blueFACTORY technology park, the SLL will play a central role in the positioning of this new site as a "zero carbon" innovation square. It will be an experimental building (yet to be constructed) which will stimulate the cooperation among research groups from EPFL, the University of Fribourg and Fribourg’s College of Engineering and Architecture (EIA-FR) by taking advantage of such institutions’ complementary expertise. The University of Fribourg will base two research groups dedicated to the legal and economic aspects of the intelligent homes of the future at the SLL. For its part, the EIA-FR will contribute with two applied research groups devoted to the technological aspects. As a result, more than fifty researchers will work on the site. The SLL will also aim for the development of research projects with third-party institutions such as the Swiss Federal Laboratory for Materials Science and Technology (EMPA).

The Canton of Fribourg will finance the infrastructure, installation and running of the University and EIA-FR’s research groups, as well as three EPFL chairs, two of them regular and one for a guest professor. EPFL is on its part committed to adding two other chairs and covering their costs.

Thus, the blueFACTORY site will at first have five EPFL’s teaching and research chairs. The agreement in principle will be followed by a detailed convention to be established by the end of the year.

blueFACTORY is the result of a partnership between the state and the city of Fribourg. This technology and innovation park is located where the Cardinal brand used to be based for over a hundred years. It already hosts twenty local startups working on sustainable development. The winner of the urban planning and development competition for the global conception of the site was presented on 27 March 2013. The works for constructing the 60,000 m² blueFACTORY Technology Park are scheduled to begin next year.