This project presentation was created in cooperation with BAUMEISTER.
Wood processing is the profession of the Ziegler Group. What could be more obvious than to develop the architecture of the new office and administration building entirely from the company's products – from peeled logs to roof battens. Brückner and Brückner Architekten found large forms and details for a convincing corporate identity in the middle of the Upper Palatinate coniferous forest almost playfully.
If you leave the A93, drive the B15 in the direction of Tirschenreuth and then turn onto the Porcelain Road to Plößberg, it can happen that you have to drive slowly for a few kilometers behind a semitrailer truck loaded with huge tree trunks, which has the same destination, the Betzenmühle: the largest single-site sawmill in Europe. Where the coniferous forest thins out, tall-crowned pines dance around a four-storey building, whose glass facades are surrounded by up to 19 meters of protruding spruce trunks. The two-row staggered trunk wreath, closer to the corners of the building, which seems to grow directly out of the ground and support the cantilevered flat roof, could be described as a perfect "decoy mimicry": the 156 hand-peeled tree trunks, which will sooner or later naturally turn grey, resemble the new building to the forest, refer to the spruce trees felled on the construction site and the raw material of the sawmill, which is reflected in the valley depression in front of the east façade of the administration building. Lure mimicry, the term from the animal kingdom because this unusual wooden façade, which forms a fixed sun and privacy screen, makes all customers of the sawmill curious about what will happen inside.
The leitmotif of commercial forest and wood processing has been echoed with a strong basic chord of the spruce trunk facades.
If you continue to the entrance in the Brunnenhof, you will initially feel surrounded by glass and aluminum. But the moment the visitor stands in the lobby, he feels and smells that he has arrived in a bright wooden world. The new administration building is supported by wooden columns, crosswise glued cross-laminated timber ceilings with wooden beams in conjunction with the in-situ concrete reinforced concrete cores of the two opposite stairwells and flat steel tension bands provide the necessary building bracing.
The mullion transom construction of the windows is also made of light-coloured wood, which was only clad on the outside with aluminium to prevent the harshness of the weather. So if you stand in the entrance lobby, you can look through the floor-to-ceiling windows into a second courtyard, further through the western offices, further through the "perisasis", the wreath of columns made of trunks, into the western forest. In the opposite direction, the view glides beyond the Brunnenhof, into the adjacent lounge, between through the tree trunks of the façade, over to the sawmill's storage areas. Due to the arrangement of the remarkably high rooms around the two inner and atrium courtyards, there is no room in the entire house that does not have a reference to the forest and light on at least two sides. Brückner and Brückner have largely dispensed with separating interior walls made of non-load-bearing, crosswise glued cross-laminated timber walls. And where they were already attached for acoustic reasons, they show a super-fine, matt shimmering light surface, which is also carefully accentuated at the protruding corners. mitre is cut.
Source: BM 11/20 - Building with wood - Part 2
Photos: mju-fotografie, Marie Luisa Jünger
