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

Data

Completion

1994

Address

Zunftstraße 15-17
06847 Dessau-Roßlau Germany

Client

ANH Hausbesitz, Dessau

Emscher G Pavillon

Bottrop

In this bizarre space of a sprawling industrial landscape, the pavilion was conceived as a fascinatingly graceful belvedere. It is an explicitly technical structure that follows the topographical movement, yet, positioned precisely at the junction between the wastewater treatment plant and the forest, it makes the previously barely noticeable boundary between technology and nature tangible once again.

Its transparent membrane, formed by two glass slopes, rises at the same angle as the hillside and seems to grow directly out of it. Beneath this membrane, suspended between two slender, silver-shimmering towers and supported by a steel bridge beam, stretches a bright, multifunctional exhibition space. This space, along with the bridge beam above it and its attractive viewing platform, offers a panoramic view of a distinctive part of the Ruhr region.

Structurally, the towers serve as supports for the bridge, while functionally they act as gateways to the exhibition and viewing platform. Behind their skin of silvery, shiny corrugated metal, the extensive technical systems of the pavilion are housed. The steel bridge beam, in turn, serves as a support for the delicate truss girders made of sheet steel, which hold the frameless glass lamellas that form the membrane, using equally graceful stainless steel wire clamps.

It is an intelligent skin over an extremely reduced skeleton, with the exhibition space matching its flexibility and transparency.

Six display panels, each rotatable by 360 degrees, allow for rapidly changing interior designs. For events or lectures, the panels discreetly disappear into a niche in one tower, while a mobile, space-saving pantry emerges from the opposite tower. The pavilion's construction is equally optimized and entirely reversible, with a high degree of prefabrication allowing for an assembly time of just six weeks.

Awards

Architecture Prize of the BDA-Ruhr

1994

Architecture Prize of the WestHyp Foundation

1994

Architecture Prize of the State of North Rhine-Westphalia

1995

German Steel Construction Award

1996

Data

Completion

1994

Address

In d. Welheimer Mark 190 46238 Bottrop
Germany

Client

Emschergenossenschaft, Bottrop

Competition Suspension Railroad Kluse

Wuppertal

The Kluse suspended railroad station in Wuppertal, which was destroyed during World War II, is being rebuilt at its historic location near the Schauspielhaus theater. Since several urban pathways intersect at this point, Petersen Architects placed great emphasis on urban significance and integration in their station design.

The lower distribution level serves as an additional public space during the day, illuminated by the translucent platforms above. These platforms are made of slip-resistant, walkable glass [Litefloor].

The entire structural framework is divided into longitudinal planar structures, which are stiffened by compression pipes both at the platform level and above the tracks, as well as by cable tensioning. Each structural frame consists of a pair of cantilevered external supports, inclined in alignment with the frames of the track carriers. These supports bear the facade and are shaped according to their bending loads. Together with a story-high truss below the distribution level, they form a tensioned structural system.

In front of the single-glazed facade, perforated metal panels are hung at a distance, serving as glare and sun protection. The steel frames of these panels are mounted on sliding mechanisms and can be lowered down to the access level to lock and secure the station, giving the structure a different appearance at night.

Infrastructure Public Steel

Data

Competition

1991

Address

Bundesallee 248
42103 Wuppertal
Germany

Dance School “S”

Gelsenkirchen

At the start of the planning process, the site was already 100 percent built over. In a desolate block between the pedestrian zone and the market square, a supermarket occupied the entire ground floor area. Since the continuous operation of the supermarket could not be disrupted, even temporarily limited interventions were not allowed. Additionally, the existing structure was not really suitable for accommodating another floor, and various ventilation systems and skylights on its flat roof had to be preserved.

On the other hand, the dance school posed an acoustic problem, which, given the precarious structural conditions, could not be mitigated in the usual way by adding mass to the building. While the function called for a heavy structure, the situation required exactly the opposite—a very lightweight building. Therefore, we opted for a modular steel construction made of beams and frames, which now cantilevers two and a half meters over the non-load-bearing wooden structure of the supermarket in the area of the dance room.

The anchoring of the frames in the adjacent old building, which left all the roof installations untouched, now also prevents direct sound transmission with the hollow space underneath. However, since the central support could only bear 64 percent of the total load, while the outer supports still had reserves, the central support had to be lowered by 4.9 centimeters. Only during the course of the construction progress was the main beam allowed to gradually bend, transferring more of its load to the outer supports.

Additionally, both the heating system and the ventilation systems had to be installed in a space-saving manner, separated from the dance school's operational area and accommodated in the narrow courtyard. The structure also had to be protected from the vibrations of the dance floor. This led to the solution of adding a technical tower to the single-story dance hall. Positioned between the neighboring firewalls, the tower, with its streamlined cladding of corrugated aluminum and the dynamic appearance of a racing car, draws the attention of passersby into the interior of the block, initiating a transition from the extroversion of the body to the staged introversion of the spatial structure.

Steel