Möbel Martin

Raising the curtain on a 3D facade

4,000 m² cladding facade with impressive shadowing
What we cannot hide, we must emphasize. According to this motto, the team at Thomas Müller Ivan Reimann Architects staged the imposing, impressive 233,000 m³ converted space with its almost windowless facade. They designed an external envelope for the newbuild for the furniture company Möbel Martin in Saarbrücken, which grants the large and clumsy building undreamt of lightness: a metallic folding curtain.

However, realizing this bold design was anything but easy. The design of folds in the curtain proceeded along narrow lines, with a three-dimensional inclination.

A technique was employed for this, which until now was used rather infrequently and which only a small number of companies throughout Germany have been able to master – on this size and scale. Trust and confidence was placed in the company Henke AG from Hagen, and they were awarded the contract, because they had already realised a project of this size and scale successfully, with the cladding facade for the Bauhaus branch office in Berlin-Halensee. This cladding specialist banked on a substructure system from the manufacturer SYSTEA for this Saarbrücken project, as they had already done in Berlin. The installers and the substructure system manufacturers formed a design team, which tackled the huge challenge of designing and planning this 3D facade.

In the end around 2,000 metal cassettes were used to cover a surface area of 4,000 m², each one of them individually tailored and up to 700 mm deep. In order for the facade to appear absolutely even on completion, the highest precision remained foremost during the manufacture of all components.

Only once the aluminium substructure system, developed as a one-off as a special solution for this construction project, and the aluminium composite panel cassettes had been aligned perfectly to one another, was it possible to arrange the individual elements with two standard axes and using vertical diagonal positioning of one degree, quickly and flawlessly.

Working to the nearest millimetre for joint design
As the words tell us, especially for joint design, we were working down to the nearest millimetre, for with vertical joints over about 20 metres, every protrusion and every mistake is immediately visible, and every millimetre deviation of the line of progression from the calculated line and planned dimensions certainly increases exponentially to several centimetres. The structural components would then no longer connect properly to one another and narrow joints which were once exactly 10 mm wide, would be several centimetres wide at the end.

Dimensional tolerance during production and above all during installation therefore was approaching zero, and for all parties involved, the work ended up as both a technical and construction installation masterpiece.

Materials perfectly matched to one another
The SYSTEA Aluminium substructure and the Alucobond composite panels used for this construction task were exactly the right materials, as they can be cut to size exactly, down to the nearest millimetre, installed to the nearest millimetre and possess long-lasting dimensional stability. And thus, even when subjected to temperature changes, they keep their dimensions and guarantee a permanently precise and exact facade appearance, free from damages.

It is not hard to see that the cost and effort expended was worth it. An impressive facade came into being after only eight months, which receives a moving profile of light-and-shade of subtle silver tones during daylight hours, whilst in the evening LED illumination casts powerful shadows and creates a festive atmosphere.

Project details

  • Project: Möbel Martin
  • Place: Saarbrücken
  • Country: DE
  • Building type: Commercial + Industry
  • Type of construction project: New build
  • Completion: 2019
  • SYSTEA wall bracket: Aluminium-L-brackets
  • SYSTEA profile system: KU35 VA with special construction
  • Cladding material: Alucobond ACM Aluminium Composite Panels
  • Fastening: Concealed
  • Installer: Henke AG
  • Architect: Thomas Müller Ivan Reimann Gesellschaft von Architekten mbH, Berlin
  • Photos: Stefan Müller

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