Siemens officially opened the new headquarters of its Austrian subsidiary at a gala event in Vienna on Friday. The company has invested around €150 million in the new home for its 6,000 local employees. The new buildings feature an extremely ecofriendly design coupled with advanced green building technology. “Siemens City highlights our strong commitment to the Vienna location and to Austria,” said Siemens President and CEO Peter Löscher. 

Siemens City comprises two new buildings as well as the existing structures at the company’s tradition-rich location on Siemenstrasse in Vienna’s Floridsdorf district. The new headquarters are a showpiece of energy-efficient construction and innovative environmental technology. The City’s new tower rests on 120 concrete pillars that, extending 30 meters into the earth, heat the buildings’ offices in winter and cool them in summer through special conductor pipes. Water is heated by a rooftop solar collector surface with an area of 200 m². Seventy-five percent of the exhaust air energy produced is recovered via heat exchangers. 

The Siemens building management system in Vienna, which can access some 10,000 sensors, provides extremely energy-efficient lighting, room temperature and ventilation control. For example, heating and lighting systems in an office are automatically shut down when a sensor signals that all employees have left the room. The energy-efficiency measures implemented in the new headquarters will reduce annual CO₂ emissions by 1,000 tons. As a result, Siemens City has already received EU green building status for energy-efficient buildings.