Part of Boston’s 1,000-acre Innovation District, the Fraunhofer Center for Sustainable Energy Systems’ Building Technology Showcase is a renovated six-story, three-bay loft structure originally built in 1913 for wholesale leather merchant W. Herbert Abbot. Fraunhofer CSE worked with the Fort Point Channel Landmark District Commission and the National Park Service’s Historic Preservation Program to retrofit the building with energy-efficient technologies while still respecting its character. Researchers and staff moved into the building in April.
“Due to the very large installed base of existing buildings, increasing the scale and depth of energy-saving retrofits is essential to achieving the United States’ energy efficiency and climate change mitigation goals,” explains Dr. Kurt Roth, Fraunhofer CSE’s director of building energy technology. “In particular, an intense need exists to develop, test, evaluate and demonstrate emerging energy-saving technology practices for existing buildings that can deliver significant energy savings at a reasonable cost, while enhancing the quality of the built environment and maintaining each building’s architectural qualities.”