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Full colour: intended as a landmark in an otherwise dreary part of the city, this building incorporates latest glass technology and passive energy devices

Architectural Review, The, August, 2003 by Emma Jacques

Sauerbruch Hutton's pharmacological laboratories for Boehringer Ingelheim Pharma KG in Biberach, south-west Germany are intended to be a landmark in an otherwise neat but dull industrial research complex. In essence, the building has a routine programme: just more offices and laboratories to add to the mass already there. Attached to a dreary existing block, the new seven-storey building politely continues its height, but is quite different in expression. Sauerbruch & Hutton have used their familiar palette of colours: magenta, ochre, burnt sienna, pale blue-white and so on, to generate an abstract pattern of vertical rectangles, which wanders gently over the whole facade. The building is undoubtedly the most dramatic on the whole campus, and, though it is not on the main road, it acts as a visual attractor to the middle of the complex, and its generous one-and-a-half level height foyer, associated with the cafeteria and smoking area (which can be used for informal lectures), is a focus for cross-campus paths. In fact, the coloured panels are single-paned silk-screen fritted glass louvres that form a rainscreen over the whole visible part of the exterior, save the entrances, which are in ordinary glass. The rainscreen is part of an overall energy strategy.

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Planning is very simple: accommodation is divided into four strips. On the west side, offices are naturally ventilated. Then there is the atrium, which brings light from the sky into the middle of the building, and also acts as a thermal chimney, allowing the whole west side of the building to be naturally ventilated. To the east is the laboratory strip, in which all spaces are air conditioned (and sometimes specially ventilated) but naturally lit. Between this strip and the atrium is a layer of dark labs from which daylight must be excluded. Laboratories are connected to galleries that serve the offices by bridges over the voids of the atrium, and both labs and offices are capable of varied configuration. Open stair cases connect floors of the atrium through the voids.

In energy terms, the main problem with such a large glass-covered box is of course cooling. The rainscreen filters effects of sun and external temperature. Its tempered louvres, the ones opposite the window strips on the inner wall, are centrally pivoted, and the three external walls are controlled separately by a central building management system. Convection in the voids between rainscreen and the inner walls (which have insulation on the outside) promotes natural ventilation in the offices and cooling for the laboratories. Exposed concrete in foyer and atrium allows the structure to act as a thermal flywheel and, in summer, night air is induced up the atrium to cool the mass.

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On sunny days particularly, the building sparkles. Open louvres through which light is transmitted take on completely different colours from fixed spandrel panels of the same kind of glass. As the sun moves, the building changes with it. But one is left with a worry: what happens to people who have to look out from their offices or labs through a passage of magenta glass if they don't like magenta?

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