(BDT_12_076) Burda Media Park - Building Types Online

Description

In 1907, Hubert Burda founded a small printing shop in Offenburg, and in so doing, laid the cornerstone for today’s Hubert Burda Media Holding, a media giant that today publishes 160 newspapers worldwide. The client’s decision to erect the new publishing house on the same premises also entailed the refurbishment of the company’s entire site. The existing buildings, which neither form an architectonic unity nor follow a town planning model, will be redeveloped, demolished, added onto and reorganized. In this connection, the new building is not just significant in terms of urban design; it is also exemplary in terms of office organisation and climate control system design.

The new building is developed along the curve of the street, optically integrating the detached buildings on the opposite side of it. Wood-panelled balustrades, regular distances apart, structure the transparent four-storey glass façade. From the street, all that is visible of the building – a row of built volumes in the form of trapeziums that radially interlock with the landscape – are the six wide overhanging roofs. Each roof spans 50 metres and forms a long arch from the town-facing side of the building, four storeys high, to the adjacent pastoral landscape, thereby providing a flowing transition from townscape to landscape. Glass-walled lifts, filigree steel stairways and profile-reduced glass façades form the connecting links between the individual segments.

The starting point for the erection of the new publishing house was the client’s desire to unite the various publishers and to bundle journalistic expertise. Communication, interaction and network structure are reflected in the office concept. Under the arched roofs emerges an office landscape that reminds one of Herman Hertzberger’s Centraal Beheer building in Apeldoorn (Netherlands). As the arch develops, the internal spatial structure changes from private offices through group offices and meeting rooms to an open fabric of rooms with terraces staggered storey by storey.

With these four workplace types – which are to be found in each of the six building segments – the new building takes account of the wide range of tasks in a publishing house. Interaction and communication have different values placed on them depending on the department – advertising and marketing, bookkeeping and editing – and this is expressed in the distinctions made in the spatial requirements. The office develops in the individual segments along the middle axis. As traffic and communication zones, these are well furnished with meeting tables and seating areas in order to provide space for short, spontaneous team conferences. The cellular offices are separated from the intermediate zone by transparent glass walls, so that they become combination offices. A filigree straight-flight stairway, accompanied by a two-metre-wide band of skylights in the roof, links the open terraces to each other. The stairway enables close cooperation not only between the various editorial teams, but also between different departments, such as layout, photo editing and graphics. The terraces provide niches and at the same time, create a link between the open fabric of rooms and the entirety of the space, which extends out into the landscape through the floor-to-ceiling glazing of the ground floor façade. French windows give the staff direct access to the adjacent meadowland, which has been landscaped to form an outside terrace next to the cafeteria. Located in the first of the finger-like building segments, this is an Internet café. The large auditorium and the two-storey-high entrance hall offer employees the opportunity to engage in spontaneous conversation with their colleagues during festivities, discussions and lectures.

A variety of systems, reflecting the variety of workplaces, have been implemented for the building’s climate control system. The top priority was that the internal climate should adapt itself automatically to the external conditions, but be capable of being individually regulated at any time. With exposed concrete ceilings as thermal masses, the temperature in the open-plan office areas is regulated passively in summer and winter, and actively by means of integrated building component cooling. In summer, computer-controlled fabric blinds on the outside prevent the building from overheating and rainproof ventilation louvres set into the façade underneath the flaps of the openings ensure that the rooms are cooled during the night. Locally, the system is supplemented by radiators and suspended cooling ceilings.

The mercurial world of publishing finds its counterpart in this lively building structure with its highly differentiated office design and climate control system.