Competition Volkswohl Bund Insurance

Dortmund

Volkswohl Bund Insurance aims to secure its success for the future. To achieve this, a new building with modern workplaces and functions is necessary.

Urban Planning Concept

The block perimeter at Chemnitzer Straße – Hohe Straße – Südwall will be closed. The existing street-level base floors will be demolished, and the high-rise will be exposed and accessed via an appropriate, forecourt. This square opens up the city access from Hohe Straße towards the city center and visually connects the city center with the adjacent residential area. A place with vibrant qualities will emerge. The courtyard will be extensively greened and kept free of vehicular traffic.

Design/Architectural Concept

The building will be centrally accessible—a two-story entrance hall serves as the starting point for straightforward navigation within the building. From here, all functional units are directly accessible. Two building wings will be constructed parallel to Südwall. The space between these wings will be designed as a water feature and will be generously visible from the entrance hall.

Material

The new building will be bright! The glass facades are full-height and alternate with stainless steel surfaces on the solid parts. The roof surfaces of the underground garage will be greened. The floors in the entrance hall and the dining areas will have natural stone coverings, while the office areas will feature continuous textile floor coverings. The skylobby will have a wooden floor that extends out as a terrace into the roof garden. Walls adjacent to the facades will be made of drywall. Interior walls leading to the corridors can be transparent or opaque in certain areas or covered with wood.

Construction

The structural framework—columns and flat slabs—will be constructed from reinforced concrete. The existing ceiling structures of the existing building will receive a suspended cooling ceiling with a clear room height of approximately 2.85 meters. The conference room will be opened up over two floors, allowing for the seamless integration of technical infrastructure for climate control and media. The roof of the dining area will be designed as a sloped concrete slab, with parts of it being greened.

Principles of Technical Equipment

Minimizing cooling and heating energy requirements, maintaining low operating costs, high daylight utilization, high thermal comfort, and cost-efficiency.

Outdoor Areas

The property will be significantly built upon. The roof of the underground garage will be greened and accessible. Terrace areas in front of the dining areas will be paved or covered with wood. All plants will have shallow roots and be suitable for flat roofs—trees and hedges will have separate planting elements. The courtyard between the building wings will be covered with a pond. Bamboo will be placed in special planting elements within the water area.

Concrete Glass Office Steel

Data

Competition

2007

Address

Südwall 37 - 41
44137 Dortmund

Awarding Authority

VOLKSWOHL BUND Versicherungen, Dortmund

Dortmund Central Station

Dortmund

What could a train station look like that is not just a transit point, but a gateway to the city?

Dortmund needs a new central station. The existing station is frequented by around 130,000 visitors every day. In its existing form, it is dysfunctional and does not meet the requirements of a modern station building. A new building should also provide a convenient link between the city center and Nordstadt. As a result of the topographical conditions, a height difference of approx. 20m must be bridged. The city center is approx. 20m higher than the northern part of the city.

For this reason, we are proposing a linear station, a very wide footbridge on the city center elevation. It crosses the tracks at a height of approx. 10m. From here, all platforms can be reached directly via stairs, moving walkways or elevators. Retail and gastronomy as well as rail-related services, waiting areas, play areas and informal meeting places will be installed on this footbridge. The Ponte Vecchio in Florence could serve as a reference, but here these areas are fully covered.

The linear station ends on a generously dimensioned forecourt on the north side of the station area. Here, Vis-á-vis houses are being built for access and vertical distribution, for work, gastronomy, leisure, medical services and other services. All new structures and components are developed from basic geometric shapes. These compact buildings will become the prelude to the adjoining urban quarter. They thus play an important role in the pedestrian access to the station and the city.

Glass Infrastructure Mixed Public Steel

Daten

Address

Königswall 14
44137 Dortmund

Olpe 39

Dortmund

The district at the Ostwallmuseum, in its current form, emerged at the beginning of the 20th century within the historic city wall ring. Since then, it has been characterized by residential space mixed intensively with small retail areas. This allowed a suburban environment to develop immediately adjacent to the city center, which gained regional significance primarily due to its gastronomic diversity from the 1960s to the 1990s.

At this inner-city location, the lifespan of a building is determined by its ability to flexibly respond to changing uses and requirements.

With this in mind, "Olpe 39" is based on the concept of storage (storage system/virtual storage/stacked urban space).

The facade translates this idea into a "Macro-Chip": it signals different synapses in the form of differentiated glass panels, which are either transparent or translucent. The interior-exterior visual relationship is focused through translucent facade sections—the external space, park, and trees shape the view outside and are integrated into the building's interior. They fill the view (unobstructed by facade profiles, safety barriers, ventilation flaps, or radiators). The view remains unobstructed.

Concrete Glass Living Office

Data

Completion

2002

Address

Olpe 39
44135 Dortmund

Client

HBP Grundstücksverwaltung GbR mbH Dortmund

Friedrich-List-Platz

Leipzig

The first reinforced concrete building in Leipzig housed the "Leipziger Textil Center" (LTC) until 1996. The usage was discontinued in favor of high-density development on this site at the edge of Leipzig’s city center. On approximately 57,000 square meters at the city’s edge, offices, shops, 120 apartments, and about 400 parking spaces were created.

The buildings were all constructed using in-situ concrete with round columns and flat slabs. The floor plans are flexible and can be divided into units starting from 150 square meters. All surface water is collected and directed into ponds located in the three courtyards.

Among the tenants are Leipzig-TV with offices, studios, and production spaces, a private school, and a number of medium-sized businesses.

Concrete Glass Office Steel

Awards

1. Prize
Appraisal Procedure

Data

Completion

2001

Address

Friedrich-List-Platz 1
04103 Leipzig
Germany

Client

Büll & Dr. Liedke
Hamburg

Ruhr-Lippe HQ Office

Dortmund

The new building complex is located on the site of the former district office in Hörde, between Wilhelm-van-Vloten-Straße to the south and Karl-Harr-Straße to the northeast.

The buildings of the "Ruhr-Lippe Project" are designed as an ensemble with a complex usage concept. The core of the program is an office building with approximately 6,800 m² of office space. This core function is accessed via a multifunctional foyer floor, which includes central information zones, exhibition spaces, and an event forum.

The site is characterized by a prominent topography that defines the urban space along its longitudinal axis, as well as by valuable, mature trees.

The terrain is accentuated by a new, single-story edge that cantilevers into the public space. This creates a platform on which the new buildings are freely arranged and connected by open spaces. The recessed ground floor leads visitors directly into the foyer of the main building. Between the different uses, an independent urban space with a high degree of recognizability is created.

Concrete Glass Office Steel

Data

Completion

1998

Address

Karl-Harr-Straße 5
44263 Dortmund
Germany

Client

Ruhr-Lippe Wohnungsgesellschaft mbH, Dortmund

FRIZ Service Centers

Dessau

Giving a young company a distinctive identity and connecting corporate identity with the genius loci was the challenge of the FRIZ service and shopping centers.

Three markets in three very different peripheral locations of East German cities, three distinct individualities forming a unique corporate identity, shaped by the architecture and the unconventional, bold "FRIZ" logo.

With minimal material usage and construction weight, the trusses effortlessly achieve large spans thanks to the use of multiple folded and cold-rolled steel sheets. Stabilized with steel cables and left unclad, supported by a few slender steel columns, they stretch over flexible and transparent retail spaces. Despite their multifunctional division into shop-in-shop units, these spaces are experienced as a continuous spatial flow.

Connections to the urban space are established through large-scale glazing and modular aluminum facades, whose surfaces feature a lively internal structure and shifting shadow relief that integrate into the sharp building silhouettes.

No repetition of banal unoriginality, no artificial postmodern camouflage, but rather a minimized and modular construction of compact building forms that translate different service offerings and local contexts into striking architectural designs.

As confident, standalone organizing elements, the FRIZ service centers inscribe themselves into the disparate, fragmented edges of the cities—so successfully that additional projects for the company's expansion and its architectural corporate identity are already in progress.

Glass Retail Steel