Administration building for the Goettingen telephone exchange
Quality means: It`s the customer who will come back – not the merchandise.
(Hermann Tietz)
The new administration building for the Goettingen Telephone Exchange consists of two offset L-shaped blocks which are open to the south-east, are functionally linked by connecting wings and enclose an inner garden area that relates directly to the buildings. The new office building lies approx. 4 km north of Goettingen’s city centre, on the edge of an industrial estate. The design had to take account of the following considerations:
1.The new blocks had to be positioned at the north-west end of the site in order to achieve a clear spatial separation from the featureless and undistinguished commercial buildings that occupy the southern and eastern portions of the site. This has created space for a garden area (garden forecourt) in front of the Telephone Exchange, oriented towards the city.
2.As a result of the above constraints imposed by the site, the new buildings back directly onto the main Hamburg-Munich railway line to the west and the factory complex to the north. These elevations have been executed in brick to form a hard barrier that isolates the buildings and their occupants from these features.
3.The need to have the complex open to the south-east, facing towards the city, and to signpost this opening architecturally as the entrance to the complex with a pair of flanking end buildings.
4.The need to create quiet workspaces in the north and west wings of the complex, looking in part towards the inner garden courtyard. Wherever possible side rooms and service spaces have been sited to overlook the railway line and factory complex.
The architectural design concept follows the logic dictated by the constraints of the site in its choice of façade materials. Brick frontages to the north and the west serve as architectural parentheses, as it were, which frame and define the building. The elevations facing the city and the inner garden courtyards are executed as a double-layer aluminium construction, with each layer visually differentiated by its colour. The actual frontage of the building is finished in blue, while the suspended brise-soleil system is green.
The building derives its aesthetic tension from the relationship between the different materials (brick, aluminium facade) and the use of colour to differentiate the various elements, which alter in appearance according to the quality of the daylight.
The main entrance is approached between the pair of flanking end buildings and faces towards the city. A central, top-lit multi-storey entrance foyer or atrium greets the visitor; articulated by galleries, walkways and offset stairwells, and finished in bold colours, it forms the central focus of the complex thus facilitating navigation and orientation.
