Description
Four professorial chairs of the Faculty for Mechanical Engineering and Electronics of Cottbus University do research in the field of lightweight materials for innovative application in the automotive and aviation industry. Since the university wants to combine academic teaching with hands-on practice and work experience, students of architecture and their teachers established a non-profit planning company to work on refurbishment projects and extensions on campus. The research centre is their first completed project.
The brief called for a building offering spaces for research and development propelled by communication and teamwork; it was also to reflect the innovative research concept with cutting-edge architecture. The priority objective of the participating chairs is to establish synergies between university and companies of the industry to bridge the gap between theory and practice.
Panta Rhei is classical Greek and can be translated with ”all things are in constant flux”. The term stands for the high flexibility and variability the project is to provide for future developments. The most suitable form to achieve this goal is a single large space with an open plan arrangement.
The design idea is simple: A long building volume is placed into a hall covered by a curved roof. These elements form a clear and compact large structure. The mono-curved roof clad with perforated sheet metal covers all laboratory and study rooms on an area of 72 x 38 m. Following a ”house-in-house” scheme, an elongated three-storey structure is arranged on one long side of the hall. On the ground floor, it houses the laboratories, and mixed-use offices and meeting rooms on the two upper floors. Highly flexible areas for experiments are located in the hall and visually linked to all rooms within the building.
Curved steel girders constitute the form of the hall building. Its gable ends are fully glazed. On its south side, the cantilevering seminar room marks the entrance which is oriented towards the axis of the campus walk. The lightweight building envelope encourages onlookers to have associations with the research field of the building: the development of applications for magnesium (besides aluminium) in order to reduce weight and thus energy consumption.
Drawings
Schematic sketch of building
Ground floor
First and second floor
Cross section
Longitudinal section through hall with elevation of integrated office volume
Photos
The distinctive cantilevering seminar room – a red box – accentuates the entrance which is oriented towards the main campus walk
Experiments and theoretical work are carried out next to each other: the hall houses machinery, the long structure accommodates offices and laboratories
Originally published in: Hardo Braun, Dieter Grömling, Research and Technology Buildings: A Design Manual, Birkhäuser, 2005.