A multifunctional building devoted to advanced medical technology training
Siemens Erlangen has had a medical training centre erected in the immediate vicinity of its medical technology factory on the alley along Röthelheimpark - the "Siemens Training Center, Medical Solutions, Erlangen" as it is known. The building occupies the interstices between the outskirts of the city centre and the new borough of Röthelheimpark currently taking shape. A major urban planning project has been underway here since 1994 to create housing for some 4,000 people on land that became surplus after the withdrawal of American troops formerly stationed there. The aim is to create an attractive and vibrant new urban district with a mix of housing, employment, shopping, research and recreational facilities.
The scheme authored by Nuremberg architectural firm Loebermann+Partner involves a bi-level structure that harmoniously complements the adjacent canteen building. Two L-shaped entities elegantly combine to form a two-to-four-storey succession of indoor and outdoor spaces. Their interlinkage is underlined by the alternating use of almost completely closed, rendered facades and storey-high glass bands that open the house up entirely to the south and to the street. The main entrance affords access to an interior courtyard from which the entire Training Center can be reached. Key architectural features are optimum orientation, the high functionality of spaces and transparency. The Training Center's educational and office facilities are spatially separate.
The Siemens Med-Training Center is attended by more than 5,000 students a year - up to 180 a day. Correspondingly high demands are made of the materials used to facilitate transparency and connectivity between spaces and function areas, to wit windows and doors with handles by FSB that are subjected to considerable loads given the usage levels involved and need to be up to the job. The door handle opted for is FSB 1076 in Stainless Steel, a material particularly well-suited to such exacting requirements, with an AGL compensating bearing. AGL engineering ensures unbeatable ruggedness, since the bearings that absorb tensile and compressive forces are no longer metal-only but compounds of rubber and metal.
The window handle design opted for was FSB 3476 in AluGrey®, a material innovation by FSB that nicely matches the colour scheme for facades and windows. The RAL 9007 and RAL 7043 shades of grey selected for these emphasize the building's unfussy elegance. Further reasons for adopting the FSB hardware besides its material-related qualities were, according to Wolfgang Loebermann, a functionally and formally well-conceived design that distinguishes all products by FSB and unobtrusively subordinates itself to a given architectural concept whilst also impressing the user with its haptic properties.
By combining the manufacture of large-scale medical equipment with a training centre that permits intensive coaching in the use of such equipment, Siemens is positioning itself to optimum effect in the burgeoning health management sector. Products by FSB guarantee ideal functional and optical support for the architectural concept.
Photos: Roland Halbe, Stuttgart
