The Building Physics Research Group of Tampere University and the Real Estate Education Centre Kiinko organised the 14th Nordic Building Physics Conference (NSB 2026) on 8–10 June 2026. The main theme of the conference was climate change in building physics.
The NSB conference is held every three years in different Nordic countries. The conference is intended for researchers, engineers, and construction professionals. The NSB conference was now held in Finland for the third time. Previous NSB conferences have been held in Espoo in 1996 and in Tampere in 2011.
Nearly 180 presentations were delivered at the conference. 240 people from 30 different countries attended the conference. Most of the participants were from the Nordic countries and Estonia, as well as from Europe more broadly, but there were also participants from nine countries outside Europe.
The NSB 2026 conference featured four invited keynote speeches by top international names in their fields. Professor Bert Blocken from Heriot-Watt University spoke about the design of wind conditions in urban environments and the use of Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) for their analysis and design. On the second day, Professor Thibaut Colinart from the University of South Brittany discussed the potential of bio-based and nature-based materials, as well as future development needs. Professor and Academician Markku Kulmala from the University of Helsinki spoke about the mechanisms and consequences of climate change mitigation and data-driven decision-making. The third day was opened by Angela Sasic Kalagasidis, Professor of Building Physics at Chalmers University of Technology, who discussed how building physics is expanding from the scale of individual buildings to that of entire building stocks, and how building physics expertise can be applied across other disciplines.
Side events were organised daily in connection with the conference. Before the actual conference, a Summer School event for doctoral students and experts in building physics was held on 5–6 June 2026. The evening before the conference, the conference participants gathered at the restaurant Puisto. Following each day’s programme, the participants gathered for a cocktail event at the Tampere Town Hall on Monday and for dinner at Hotel Torni on Tuesday. After the closing speech of the conference participants were offered a guided tour of the Building Physics laboratories on the Hervanta campus.
NSB 2026 Conference website: nsb2026.org.
Photos from the conference are available on Kiinko’s website.
All conference materials will be compiled on the following page of the Tampere University Research Portal: https://researchportal.tuni.fi/en/activities/14th-nordic-symposium-on-building-physics-nsb-2026/.
NSB 2029 will be organised by Chalmers University of Technology in Gothenburg, Sweden.