Three oval office buildings and a circular children’s day care centre. This, essentially, describes the design with which ­ingenhoven architects won the international architecture competition for the new town hall building in Freiburg. The long-term plan of the city is to move most of its employees to the site that lies two kilometres to the west of the town centre. The first part of this project to be realised was an office building for 840 staff, along with the day care centre. Work on a second administration building is planned to start soon.

The citizens’ service office has set up its consulting rooms on the ground floor of the new town hall. The counter hall, which takes up the entire single-storey area of the ground floor, is top lit by two glass domes. The five office floors are laid out in a ring around the roof to this central space.

The new town hall achieves a net plus energy standard and is the first new inner-city administration building in Germany to do so.