La Vida, townhouses

Building with careful water management

Under the name LA VIDA, EBV Erste Südprojekt, a project company of LEWO AG, has built six modern townhouses in Leipzig with a total of 121 flats and an underground car park with 83 parking spaces. An excavation pit measuring around 3,600 m² and 4.5 m deep was planned for this construction project, the base of which reached 1.5 m into the groundwater. Lowering the groundwater would have posed considerable problems with the expected total pumping volume of 650,000 m³. Our solution for reducing the range and pumping rate was to carry out the lowering by means of horizontal drains rather than vertical wells. Although this concept significantly reduced the expected total extraction volume, it still exceeded 100,000 m³, meaning that this much gentler lowering method also had to be tested for environmental compatibility. As a result, the risk to the protected resources of soil and groundwater due to 52 suspected contaminated sites in the area of influence and the impact of the drawdown on five biotopes had to be assessed. In view of the extraction volume, this construction project represents one of the largest interventions in groundwater in Leipzig.