EDUCATIONAL EXAMPLE: INSTITUTIONAL BUILDING IN ESSLINGEN

2020-09-02

A new academic building in Esslingen has become quite the educational example. It reflects the awareness and respect owed to such a complex, historical environment and a characterised urban confidence.

Esslingen can be quite the challenge. Accessing the city by car, you have a few options. You can take the chronically congested A8 – how practical. Or, theoretically, you can take the virtually non-existent German Timber-Frame Road. Somewhere between all of this lies the architectural self-image of a city that wants to be more than just part of Stuttgart’s exurbs. After all, Esslingen is not only a picturesque medieval town – it also defines itself as a “city of engineers”. Leipzig-based office Knoche Architekten tackled the problem of confident, respectful construction, transforming the new lab building at the Esslingen University of Applied Sciences into a lesson in successful contemporary architecture amongst a historical urban structure. There must have been a strong temptation to design an architectural statement that reflects promising trend topics in a technoid megalomania. After all, students learn the construction of ultra-efficient building service installations in practical demonstrations here. It almost goes without saying that the design was awarded DGNB certification in gold.

Sensitive point of intersection Architect Christian Knoche began his career in Stuttgart, and his partners also come from the region. This surely helped them assess the local mood, a combination of the Swabians’ love for their home and an open-minded art of engineering. Previously ruled by the Staufer dynasty, the city also stands in the oversized shadow of the “arriviste” in the neighbourhood. In this agglomeration, it’s hard to tell where Stuttgart ends and Esslingen begins. But it’s clear to see where the Gründerzeit-style new city stops and the medieval city centre starts. And just this sensitive point of intersection was the site of construction.

Figure: The facade of the institutional building is made up of anodised metal panels.

Refined shell

The interior of the lab building is nothing more than a refined shell. Polished screed, sheet steel doors and open installations are the perfect combination for grasping the technology. Nothing here stands in the way of the need for practical teaching – except for maybe the unusual layout. It’s the result of historical streets and property lines – and the architects respected this anomaly, making it the key focus of their design. After all, the surrounding city landscape made of different gables became the guiding theme of the roof, and the varying scale of the neighbouring buildings is visited and conveyed in the institutional building. Located between tiny artisan cottages on the one side and Gründerzeit buildings on the other, this new institutional building does right by all sides. But this isn’t an uninspired adaptation. If anything, it expresses a deep understanding for the spirit of the city. Its heterogeneity is continued in its facade with completely different, entirely contemporary means. The irregularity of the anodised metal panels, their varying depth, the perforation and the arrangement of the few windows blend into the historically irregular look of the surroundings. A plain plaster facade may have also done the trick and certainly would have fit Esslingen’s standards of historical continuity. But this metal structure not only conserves architectural history – it respectfully continues it. A purely functional building that serves instructional purposes has been transformed into an educational example of appropriate construction in a sensitive environment.

Figure: The end of the hallway provides a look into a room with a recessed building structure of unplastered concrete.

Figure: Lots of technology and space for experiments: The “seminar rooms” are geared towards practical test setups.

Schörghuber expertise:

Doors with 50 mm door leaf thickness

Technology defines the inside of the workshop, the experiment hall and the lab of the Institute for Energy and Environment at Esslingen University of Applied Sciences. Pipes and apparatuses are all over the ceilings and walls, making for a certain sense of turmoil. In contrast, Knoche Architekten realised raw, but calming concrete walls with matching anthracite-coloured doors. They, too, have a very calm surface effect. The function of the rooms and the dark grey colour of the HPL surface may lead one to believe that these are steel doors. But they are in fact fire-rated doors and composite timber doors from Schörghuber. All doors feature very similar equipment: a 50-millimetre-thick and flush-closing door leaf, flush-fitting with the Hörmann steel frame. To create an especially calm appearance, they are equipped with concealed hinges and in some cases integrated closers. Several doors have special dimensions, such as an excess height of 2473 millimetres at a width of 1091 millimetres. Schörghuber also produces these doors in a batch of one.