Bau 30 Raumfabrik

DE-Karlsruhe

Extremely intricate post and mullion façade

This office building promises a very unique spatial experience. The elevated upper floors, the floor-to-ceiling glass façades with rounded corners and two atriums give the building the perfect level of transparency and openness for a contemporary office.

Right in the midst of this heterogeneous structural environment that Amsterdam-based architects MVRDV built Werk 12. There is no doubting that the building has the ‘wow’ factor. The architects wanted to make the steel and glass structure as minimal as possible. It was realised as a VISS façade with a face width of just 50 millimetres, and two different construction depths: The surrounding framework, which is 120 millimetres deep, holds two posts and one transom at a height of three meters, each of which are just 95 millimetres deep. As if it were not difficult enough to combine the different construction depths into one façade element, certain areas required the additional load exerted on the concrete structure by the cascade staircase to be taken into account. In these areas, the loads on the steel and glass façade are transferred laterally into the concrete structure via the crossbeam – a static approach that is only possible with steel profiles.