Description

The Landesversicherungsanstalt Schwaben [the Swabian state pension scheme] insures roughly 1.3 million people. It therefore required a customer-friendly building whose design is representative of a transparently functioning service provider.

In order that the large building mass would not dominate the small-scale order of the environment, the entire building complex was designed with moderate height development and dispersed in a variety of sophisticated individual built volumes.

The visitor is invited into a building designed to appeal to the populace at large, one that offers service, information and advice. A central entrance hall is the pivot of the whole building concept. Meeting rooms, conference rooms, a training centre, a canteen, a mailroom and the doctors’ offices are all accessed via this central junction. The refined play of colour of the glass façades and the light-coloured local wood used for the interior walls lend the building a welcoming atmosphere.

The staff work for the most part at group workplaces of four people each. These team offices form a repeating basic spatial unit and are added in pairs, one team office on each side of the central corridor to a comb-like building structure. The team offices are each divided into two private spaces by a partition down the middle. On the corridor side there are large storage areas with lighted reading trolleys.

Apart from the canteen, the computer centre and the conference rooms, the building is ventilated entirely by natural means. Even with the deep entrance hall, costly ventilation systems could be dispensed with due to the implementation of an underground channel for supplying air in conjunction with a return air shaft (see “Sustainable Building Concepts”). In order to ensure a comfortable climate, the air quality in the hall is further improved by generous planting zones.

The architects were able to do without energy hungry office cooling systems. The solid construction of the ceilings has been used as thermal mass in conjunction with nocturnal ventilation. The ceilings absorb the temperature changes in summer and in this way ensure constant room temperatures. In addition to the thermal masses, the waters from the adjacent lake are also used for evaporation cooling.

In the archive rooms with their greater depth, moveable glass louvres are mounted in front of the façade. When these are in the vertical position, they provide solar protection and when they are electrically oriented at 90 degrees to the horizontal, they divert the light into the room and thereby brighten it on cloudy days. The glass louvre structure across the front of the building prevents rain from entering when the windows are open for nighttime cooling.

---

Originally published in: Rainer Hascher, Simone Jeska, Birgit Klauck, Office Buildings: A Design Manual, Birkhäuser, 2002.