Description
During the design process of the maintenance workshop in Davos, architects Annette Gigon and Mike Guyer focussed on orientation and materials of the building to perfectly integrate into the urban context. The building shuts off the entrance area of a sports center towards the main road, thus emphasizing the spatial relation to the spa gardens. The timber façade of the new building is a reference to the existing sports center.
The area of the two-storey volume is minimized and contains only those spaces, which have to be located on the ground floor level: the depot for vehicles, workshop, washroom and carpenter’s workshop. The remaining spaces, storage and offices, are situated on the upper floor. Due to this arrangement, the upper floor projects out along both long sides of the building, thus creating roofed-over areas for the exits of the depot and workshop.
The structure is a mixed skeleton and cross wall construction with pre-stressed concrete slabs and columns. Concrete cross walls restrained between floor and ceiling slabs function as upstand beams and create the large projection towards the main road (Talstraße). The exterior walls and partitions consist of storey-high prefabricated insulated timber board elements. The façade received a ventilated rain screen of horizontal larch slats. The boards with different widths are cut in parallel fashion from the tree trunks and are mounted according to the sequence of the cut. Like the façades, the ventilated “Davos-style roof” is built up of timber, insulation and concrete.
The windows are typically set flush with the cladding. For those windows that should not offer a view to the inside, rotated cladding boards serve as fixed louvers. The glazed steel gates of the depot, which open outwards, are covered by the cantilevering building and thus protected from rain and snow. The under-side of the cantilevers is clad with hot-dip galvanized metal sheets and reflects diffuse light into the workspaces located further back.
Drawings
Originally published in: Jürgen Adam, Katharina Hausmann, Frank Jüttner, Industrial Buildings: A Design Manual, Birkhäuser, 2004.