Description

The hall of Kemeter company for sales and storage of paint is situated in Sollnau, an industrial area southwest of Eichstätt. The long building is an austere concrete structure contrasting with the environment; it comprises a storage hall and an office wing. At the front of the building, along a passage, there is customer parking. At the rear, a delivery route is recessed into the ground. At the western end on the ground floor an elongated cube, which contains special storage space for solvents and other highly inflammable substances, is inserted into the main building. The office wing is situated on top. The remaining column-free area of the hall is mainly being used as shelving storage.

Due to the difficult soil and foundation conditions in this flooding area of the nearby Altmühl river, as few columns as possible were to be used in order to reduce costs. Therefore, the hall was designed as a single volume. The 80 cm high prefab pre-stressed concrete binders are positioned at 6.25 m centers, spanning a distance of 27 m between the restrained columns. A free-standing in-situ concrete wall forms the back of the building. The office cube on the opposite site is also made of in-situ concrete and is inserted into the structure in the same way. The gaps between these elements and the binders have been closed with either glass blocks or a profiled concrete façade.

Since all building elements had to achieve an F90 fire rating due to the high fire load of the paint storage, the longitudinal façades of the hall were clad with expanded concrete. Standard expanded concrete elements were combined in such a way that they create three different window formats. The thicker elements provide a protective nose above the flush mounted windows. The recessed panels are fitted with exterior lighting at eaves level.

Instead of using a broad range of colors, which would have been the obvious choice for a paint merchant, natural material colors were used. The expanded concrete was treated – instead of receiving the common acrylic coat – with a purpose developed mineral glaze so the material retains its vivid texture.

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