Description

In the south German town of Mössingen, near Tübingen in Swabia, a new library has drawn attention, somewhat belatedly, to the contribution of a couple of Jewish entrepreneurs to the town. In 1919, the brothers Felix and Artur Löwenstein, originally from Pausa in the Vogtland region, moved here and founded the Pausa textile printing company. The company printed fabrics for the Bauhaus before they were dispossessed and forced to flee to England in 1936. The history of the print works finally ended in 2004, but what remained were the outstanding industrial buildings designed by the architect Manfred Lehmbruck (1913–1992) between 1951 and 1962. These buildings – the textile printing hall, an administration building, a boiler house, a canteen and a workshop building – were accorded listed status as an industrial ensemble.

The initial task was to find a new use for the 80-metre-long, 30-metre-deep, two-storey “barrel hall” with its robust structure. The upper floor was dominated by up to 65-metre-long printing tables, while the ink kitchen, printing stencils and later a design studio were located downstairs. Large skylights in the concrete shell provide ample light on the upper floor, but the ground floor of the reinforced concrete structure was dark and divided down the middle by a row of columns. Around half of the 1000 m² upper floor was to house the public library, with the deaconry and Neckar-Alb regional association occupying the ground floor. To allow daylight into the lower level and increase ceiling height, the architects cut a 50-metre-long and 6-metre-deep section out of half of the ceiling, to create a central 700 m² double-height area with two platforms and a lecture space for ~80 people. The dominant feature, however, is an elegant ramp made of lightweight concrete, which is held by a V-shaped support in the centre of this bay. No changes to the exterior of the barrel hall were permitted – apart from at the two ends: a projecting “reading bay” extends from the library at one end, while the other sports a broad panoramic window for a meeting room. The main façades and the roof structure were carefully renovated, respecting the detailing and colour composition of the original. The originally six-centimetre-thick roof barrels were re-insulated, replacing the only 3 cm thick tar cork insulation with 14 cm thick externally applied StoTherm mineral thermal insulation. The final layer was StoMiral K plaster. The extra thickness has been carefully concealed at the verges to retain the original slender appearance of the roof.

Almost all the interior walls are made of glass so as not to interrupt the overall impression of the original hall. All interior insulation is also sound absorbing. The floors are new: a mastic asphalt terrazzo in the semi-public areas, dark grey carpeting in the other zones. The other half of the upper floor is now a kind of “Pausa Museum” and includes one of the long printing tables as well as the fully preserved ink-mixing kitchen on the ground floor. It commemorates the town’s former industrial heritage and its textile printing industry.

Originally published in Bauwelt 33.2012, pp. 28-33, abridged and edited for Building Types Online, translated by Julian Reisenberger

 

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