This is a beautiful apartment building in the center of Palma. Brutalist ground floor. Operable wooden slats up the rest of the facade. It feels right at home in this climate. It's also a passive-energy building that uses 90% less energy compared to a "conventional" apartment building. The technical classification is nZEB (or a nearly zero energy building). It's pretty amazing that with only 9 apartments, these kinds of projects pencil here. Perhaps it's no surprise that it's also a single-stair building.

The architect is OHLAB. For more information, here's their website.

We just checked into our hotel in Palma and one of the first things I noticed is that as soon as you open any of the windows/doors, the AC automatically turns off. A message on the thermostat then alerts you that it will come back on once you close the windows. I haven't yet figured out how this particular hotel room is sensing that things are open, but it's relatively easy to do this at home through smart thermostats and sensors like these. I make a real concerted effort to do this manually, and so it's great to see it automated in a hotel room, where people are naturally going to care less about wastage. Europe is so far ahead of North America when it comes to energy efficiency.

I just turned on my out of office. Neat B and I leave this evening for our honeymoon. Our first stop is Mallorca. Neither of us have been before and it has been on our list.

One of our goals for this trip is to be active. So among lots of other things, the plan is to get on some bikes at some point. We hear that Mallorca is a pretty good island for that.

As always, I'll be continuing to write. I love writing when I'm on vacation and experiencing new things. The laser distance meter is also in my bag, so expect some of this and this.