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WOHNEN • LIVING TECHNISCHER AUSBAU • TECHNICAL SOLUTIONS

Sichtbezüge ergeben sich aus den Besprechungszimmern. • Visual connections from the meeting rooms

Der offene Bürobereich wird durch die Lehmkerne geprägt. • The office area is characterized by the clay cores. Cafeteria: Der Blick geht ins Grün des Gartenhofs. • Cafeteria: The view extends into the garden courtyard.

T he rapidly growing Swiss company Erne Holzbau has managed to double its num- around the atrium can be flexibly divided, allowing for easy adaptation to changes in use
ber of employees to 330 over the last ten years. The existing office building was
in the interests of sustainability. Together with the inner courtyard, this results in a diver-
bursting at the seams, so it was high time to supplement the existing building located se range of rooms and areas that can be used in different ways: the two upper floors fea-
in Stein, Switzerland, with a new one. The contract was awarded to Burkard Meyer ture open spaces, rooms for individual retreat and meeting rooms. The finely structured
Architekten, who had already built a company building on the site in 2013. In order to roof structure with shed skylights, together with the view of the garden courtyard, brings
meet current and future space requirements and contemporary organizational forms, daylight into the interior of the building.The specially developed connection nodes in the
the architects planned a new three-storey office building on the site in Stein. Incorpora- filigree truss, which spans the entire atrium 15 metres wide, are ingeniously constructed.
ting the existing timber modular building – originally constructed from reused modules The supporting structure follows a grid of six by six metres. Hybrid wood-concrete ceiling
that the company had bought back from a customer – a new spatial whole was created elements are inserted into the supporting structure made of beech wood, which serve
with an inner courtyard, in which open room sequences complement the room modu- for cooling, heating and ventilation as well as room acoustics. The prefabricated, low-
les of the existing building to form a flexible office environment. The new building, desi- CO2 hybrid system was already used in Switzerland’s first wooden high-rise, Burkard
gned as a timber hybrid construction, continues the logic of the existing building with Meyer’s Suurstoffi 22 in Risch-Rotkreuz, and has now been further developed by the
its access and the arrangement of the primary rooms. The horizontal access structure, architects in collaboration with Erne Holzbau. The stairwells of rammed clay and the
together with the staircase located centrally in the atrium and the connecting bridges, low-shrinkage recycled flooring made from mixed demolition waste on the ground floor
forms a continuum that creates a vertical connection to the so-called market square testify to the commitment to using recyclable and ecological materials. However, as
on the ground floor. clay has no stiffening function, the idea of reinforcing steel crosses was conceived. The
floors now rest on the wooden structure, which is reinforced by individual steel crosses
Wood, clay and glass define the interior and detached from the clay cores. These are therefore two independent static units. The
rammed clay was obtained on site from the excavation and could be rammed using a
he latter is the new centre of the building and, thanks to its open, multi-storey space, production line with robots. Although the robot reduced the cost of the parts by about
offers opportunities for both teamwork and events. The entrance hall with reception and a third compared to if they had been rammed by humans, rammed-clay construction
cafeteria complements the open courtyard of the old building. The flowing floor plan is still not cheap as long as CO2 is not factored in, as Oliver Dufner from the Burkard

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