Description

The family-run Sirch company, which produces and distributes mainly toboggans and also timber packaging, timber boards, and furniture, had to be extended with a new production and storage hall. The new structure is located in Böhen between Memmingen and Kempten in the Allgäu region. The building, which was completed in October 1998 only four months after start of planning, is embedded in a gentle slope on the edge of an area consisting of residential buildings, workshops, and vehicle depots to the rear of the company premises.

The hall with a floor area of nearly 1,200 m² comprises two storeys for production and storage and follows a simple and functional language. The 4.80 m tall basement, where pallets are nailed together and stored, settles in the slope and is surrounded on three sides by concrete retaining walls. The ground floor, where toboggans are produced, is placed asymmetrically on top of the base and cantilevers on all sides, thereby exposing the underside of the timber cladding. Although an interior staircase physically links both parts of the building, the production processes of both product ranges are entirely independent of each other.

The bearing exterior walls of the basement consist of glazed trusses. Floor and ceiling slabs are constructed of prefabricated box elements providing maximum load-bearing capacity at minimal structural height. This way, finished panels with integrated flush bearers were produced allowing for the slabs to be point supported.

Through the design of different façades on both floors a formal suspense is achieved: while the basement front facing the yard has a translucent cladding of honeycomb slabs, slender vertical larch louvers wrap the glazing alongside the ground floor. Both gable ends of the elevated ground floor, which seems to hover above the basement, open up like big shop windows to the surroundings.

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Originally published in: Jürgen Adam, Katharina Hausmann, Frank Jüttner, Industrial Buildings: A Design Manual, Birkhäuser, 2004.