Description

Festo AG & Co. in Esslingen-Berkheim is one of the world’s leading developers and manufacturers of pneumatic systems. Its employees, spread over thirty rented locations in the vicinity, were to be once more concentrated at a single site in direct proximity to the production facility. The client wanted spacious, interconnected office areas that would allow for a wide variety of working formats and ensure the most flexibility. The functions that are to be accommodated in the building range from the call centre to the boardroom.

The finger-like building masses of the complex are reserved for open-plan occupancy. The private offices are situated in the connecting structure linking the three principal building masses. The areas between the connecting buildings and the individual ‘fingers’ serve as meeting zones. The atriums, with their galleries, cafeterias, action zones and venue locales, form central communication areas for breaks, short meetings and interactive encounters. The staff expect as a matter of course to benefit from a standard in keeping with the times, such as natural light, good acoustics, a comfortable climatic environment and an office concept designed to optimise internal processes and communication. State-of-the-art technology components were to be implemented for the energy and ecological objectives relative to a ‘low-energy concept,’ preferably developed in-house and with air as the building material – in accordance with the company’s main area of production.

The primary structures of the atriums are orthogonal grids of hollow section steel tubes stabilised by internal cables. The newly developed pneumatically operated atrium roof canopy comprises cushions of high transparency triple-layer ETFE foil that incorporate solar protection and are supporting due to their internal pressure. The top and the middle layers of foil are printed with a staggered positive/negative chequerboard pattern. Through relative changes of air pressure between the upper and lower volumes within the cushions – or to put it another way, through changes in the position of the middle layer – solar protection of 50 to 93% is attained. The ETFE cushion fabric has a high insulation value of circa k=2.3 and, if necessary, water can be circulated in order to recover heat from the retained air.

The 120 m² awnings on the south side of the atriums are hydraulically unfurled onto tensioned rods. The technology for this derives from shipbuilding and this is the first time it has been used for a building. The whole complex is a low-energy building. The glass skin, made entirely of krypton-filled triple glazing, attains a k-value of 0.8 over the total surface of the skin. The three largest heat exchangers for adsorption cooling that have yet been built transform the waste heat from the production facility into coolant. The combination of the building cooling through thermal masses, the use of geothermal energy, the triple-glazing and the brise-soleil system, render the new headquarters an innovative total energy concept that points the way to the future.

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