Xella has been a partner of the Belgian innovation campus Living Tomorrow in Vilvoorde near Brussels for 30 years. The center of the campus site is a futuristically shaped high-rise building, inaugurated in its time by Bill Gates. The site is still regarded as a forward-looking exhibition space, meeting place, and exchange venue for science, business, and private individuals.
Not far away, construction work has long since begun on the next project, which is scheduled for completion in September 2023: As an exclusive partner, Xella is participating as a supplier of efficient and sustainable building materials - the construction progress can be watched in a livestream.

Thanks to the innovative blue.sprint planning service and the involvement of Xella experts in digital construction planning, Xella is not only taking on the role of building materials supplier in this project, but is also acting as an important consultant.

Construct the buildings of tomorrow with digital innovations

During the planning phase, the hotel of the future was designed digitally using Xella's blue.sprint BIM service: BIM stands for building information modeling, a data-driven planning method visualized in a 3D model. In the planning process, BIM can significantly improve collaboration between the numerous project participants because all parties involved work with the same, three-dimensional model at an early stage. Changes can be easily communicated to all project participants via the model, and the error rate as well as material and labor costs remain low. The hotel on the Innovation Campus was also planned in this way: "For Xella, the partnership with Living Tomorrow 2030 is an excellent opportunity to share our experience in the field of digitalization and advanced building systems with the future," finds Nicole Wuyts, Marketing Manager at Xella Belgium.

As one of the pioneers in the industry, Xella has also been exploring the use of mixed reality on the construction site since 2018. With the help of a Hololens, the site reality is enriched with digital information. This allows them to be the basis for necessary further work steps on the construction site - including in the creation of the hotel of the future on the Living Tomorrow campus.

Feeling the future in the hotel

Anyone visiting the Innovation Campus in Vilvoorde will soon be able to stay in the Hotel of the Future and experience some of the features of tomorrow's living: Entire digitized walls will show a forest, the sea or impressions of an action movie, depending on taste - sounds included. "This will bring the meta-world into our homes. You live in an empty space and project the mood you want to be in onto the environment," says Peter Lesage, Digital Enterprise Software Architect BIM at the Xella Group. But the hotel also serves as a setting for forward-looking ideas. For example, the Xella building materials that make up the hotel will be on display, along with a QR code that introduces visitors to the sustainable properties of Ytong and Silka. In the basement, the "cave", Xella will soon provide information on how augmented and virtual reality can be used in construction.

Ideal energy efficiency with Xella building materials

The hotel of the future is made of forward-looking materials: Weatherproof Ytong panels are therefore used in its construction. The partition walls are made to measure from floor to ceiling, provided in packages and set during the construction phase. All interior walls are also made of Xella materials: Silka calcium silicate units climate walls not only ensure excellent acoustic but also ensure temperature equalization within the interior and exterior walls. The solid blocks absorb heat and gradually release it into the room. Due to this heat storage capacity, buildings remain warm in winter and pleasantly cool in summer. Air conditioning, large temperature fluctuations or drafts caused by air circulation are thus a thing of the past. In addition, the hotel saves a lot of energy as a result. Low-temperature heating systems and heat pumps increase energy efficiency and reduce costs and CO2 emissions.

Peter Lesage and Nicole Wuyts