Modern baroque ensemble - communication and technology center in Germany

Architectural Review, The, April, 1996 by Claudia Kugel

A complex brief for a regional electricity company has been dissected and reconstituted as a spatially expressive yet enlightened corporate workplace.

Frank Gehry's subversive capacity to dismember and reconstitute space is perhaps at its most disarming when applied to office buildings. Gehry's vigorously sculptural forms, together with his compartmentalisation of component spaces and celebration of difference, present a stark challenge to traditional corporate orthodoxies of uniformity and understatement. These qualities were much in evidence at the Vitra complex, where Gehry most recently designed a modern Baroque ensemble of offices and showroom (AR December 1994), elevating a humdrum programme into a magically idiosyncratic yet generously humane working environment. Here, in the small German town of Bad Oeynhausen, between Hanover and Osnabruck, Gehry has again teased apart and reassembled a pragmatic and complex brief with extraordinary results.

This latest building is a composite communication and technology centre for Elektrizitatswerk Minden-Ravensburg (EMR), a regional electricity company. The brief stipulated a combination of offices, exhibition spaces and control rooms. Promulgation of energy efficiency principles was also required, so the building incorporates a number of energy technologies and strategies appropriate to its size and type.

Located on the outskirts of Bad Oeynhausen, the new building occupies a plot on the main road leading into town. Typically, such suburban sites are economic to acquire and develop, but the architectural outcome of this process is generally undistinguished. To the west of the site is an industrial warehouse, awaiting conversion into a retail centre. To the north is a tranquil green belt running along the edge of the Werre River. Further afield is rural housing and farmland at the foothills of the Wiehen mountains. Seen from a distance as clusters of alternately swollen or splintered forms, like a monumental Cubist collage, the animated presence of the EMR building is entirely unexpected.

Amiably gatecrashing the suburban scene, the new building - or, more accurately, agglomeration - has a perplexing formal and material indeterminacy. Entry to the complex is by means of a rustically sturdy timber bridge that swings invitingly over a shallow, pebble-bottomed lake. The bridge docks and penetrates between a pair of yin yang volumes, one clad in glittering scaly, zinc and the other virginal white plaster; satisfyingly polar opposites that epitomise Gehry's totemic experimentation with materials. These discrete volumes contain an exhibition hall for renewable resources and an energy supply centre. Both have glazed ends, exposing their machine-filled innards to the street. Offices and technical facilities are housed in three scrunched-up plan forms, whirling devilishly around a communal forum. This creates a jagged urban edge on the main street frontage, while also forming garden spaces to the north and west sides of the agglomeration. An orthogonal atrium containing reception and circulation moors the three fragments together; from this glazed pivot you can gravitate to any part of the building. On the north-east side are the company offices, a three-storey squashed and extruded block of deformed cellular spaces. Technical facilities, including the network control centre for regional power distribution, occupy a two-storey block on the south-west corner. On the north-west axis are the larger, swelling volumes of conference rooms, dining hall and an auditorium for company and public presentations.

Energy efficient measures include daylighting and natural ventilation in the office wing. The technical facility, which has continuous occupancy, incorporates two thermal storage wails (the glazed ends of the energy centre and exhibition hall). The cacophony of undulating roof forms integrates photovoltaic cells for supplementary power production and solar collectors for hot water supply in the kitchen. It is also planned to preheat air entering the mechanical system by solar means.

The effect of fracturing a programme into relatively small components means that each space or room can be instilled with its own autonomy and character, yet still form part of a powerful and convincing whole. This, together with a capacity to transform ordinary materials - stucco, sheet metal, glass and plywood - into essential elements of an intriguing architecture, is what makes Gehry's work so compelling. Here, his spirit of intuitive invention - perhaps more easily assimilated by set piece house commissions - is translated to the workplace, infusing cautious corporate culture with the expressive potency of space, light and materiality.