MERCEDES-BENZ FUTURE LAB & CAMPUS EXTENSION 2.1 (MBC 2.1)
Stuttgart, Germany
CLIENT Daimler AG
PROGRAM Campus expansion with Amphitheater, Central Plaza, Classic Center for showcasing legacy automobiles, Sculpture Garden, and Future Lab: a museum for the brand’s impact on state-of-the-art mobility and a factory for creating, debating, and presenting the indeterminate future; including exhibition space for showcasing research and development activities, and (A-Z) art gallery, café, club lounge, education spaces, laboratories, lecture hall, offices, and workshops
AREA 33,500 m² (361,000 sf)
COST Confidential
STATUS Invited competition 2012; first prize 2014; MBC 2.0 and MBC 2.1 superseded by MBC 2.2
ARCHITECT REX
PERSONNEL Adam Chizmar (PL), Alberto Cumerlato, Danny Duong, Mette Fast, Luis Gil, Alysen Hiller Fiore, Tyler Hopf, Tomas Janka, Gabriel Jewell-Vitale, Roberto Otero, Joshua Ramus, Ishtiaq Rafiuddin (PL), Bogdan Rusu, Aude Soffer, Minyoung Song, Elina Spruza Chizmar (PL), Antariksh Tandon, Alex Tehranian, Matthew Uselman, Cristina Webb, Matthew Zych
CONSULTANTS Arup, Front, !melk, Theatre Projects
On May 19, 2006, Mercedes-Benz celebrated the opening of the Mercedes-Benz Museum and Center in Stuttgart, a significant milestone in the company’s role as a design catalyst and innovation leader, and an expression of the brand’s public culture as exclusive yet approachable.
Along with Mercedes-Benz’s Untertürkheim Headquarters and Plant, this assemblage of buildings also provides a framework for a potential larger scale Mercedes-Benz campus that can demonstrate the brand’s innovations, the processes by which they emerge, and their societal influence throughout time.
To fulfill this potential and construct a coherent narrative about the brand’s impact on state-of-the-art mobility, the Mercedes-Benz Future Lab is added to the constellation. Part exhibition hall and part factory for creating, debating, and presenting the indeterminate future, the Future Lab exposes the future’s possibilities in vivid presentations. Its addition completes a nucleus for the brand’s past (Museum), present (Center), and future (Lab).
The current site plan suggests the possibility of a cohesive connection of the campus to its surroundings. Extending the gentle contours of the existing landscape and pulling in the greenscape of the nearby Neckar Park transforms the hardscape setting for these buildings into a fluid, park-like environment linked to the city.
Also latent within the existing plan is the concept of a campus heart. The curving façade of the existing, stone plinth linking the Museum and Center is now extended to form a large oval that delineates a new Campus Plaza into a central landmark: a public event space and a ceremonial parade ground for vehicles.
The Classic Center is the graceful connector that completes the original plan’s suggested form for the Campus Plaza, while the Future Lab rises in a new landscape that expands the contours of Museum Hill into a park-like setting, and extends Mercedes-Benz’s presence toward Neckar Park and across the Neckar River.
Along the Plaza’s perimeter, the Campus Drive and a covered pedestrian walkway connect the entries of the Mercedes-Benz Museum, Center, Classic Center, Amphitheatre, and Future Lab. The Future Lab’s Foyer, Milk Bar, and White Cube, and the visible areas of the Classic Center—with their transparent facades—spill outside and activate the newly formed plaza.
In addition to the Campus Plaza (1) and Amphitheater (2), the raised landform creates a tableau of three additional public atmospheres: the new Mercedes-Benz Sculpture Garden (3), the Mobile Kids driving school (4), and an informal, lyrical lawn (5).
As it explores such an indeterminate notion as the future, the Future Lab strives to be a timeless structure—immune to becoming out of fashion—while offering a platform for continuous flux. The brand’s poles of “Purity and Sensuality” are infused into the edifice at every scale, from the precision and undulation of the Future Lab’s glass façade, to its Platonic circular shape enriched with a slight square aspect.
In contrast to the cloistered, protective Mercedes-Benz Museum, the Future Lab is transparent and inviting. A softly glowing, ethereal ring by night, by day its shimmering glass enclosure captures the sunlight to continually alter its appearance.
The three major functional groups of the Future Lab are stacked into layers. Level 0, connected to the Campus Plaza, includes the Foyer, White Cube, Milk Bar, and stage of the Lecture Hall. On Level 1 and coplanar with the new landscape, the Create-the-Future cluster includes Workshop, Genius workshops, Laboratory, and Lecture Hall with its own foyer and bar for special events. Levels 2 and 3—forming a single ‘layer’—present the Near Future and Far Future galleries of the Experience-the-Future hall. Offices ring the perimeter of Level 2.
In a building where flux is celebrated, a simple circulation strategy provides an anchor point of clarity. From the Foyer, visitors ascend to the Experience-the-Future on the top levels via the Future Garage’s oversized lift, then descend to the Create-the-Future, and eventually the Foyer using the Future Garage’s perimeter ramps. This strategy also enables certain building components to be closed while maintaining others in operation.
Mercedes-Benz Future Lab
Level 3:
Experience-the-Future/Near Future
(Horizontal Plateau)
Level 2:
Experience-the-Future/Far Future
(Vertical Silos)
Level 1:
Create-the-Future
(Workshop, Genius, Lab, Lecture Hall)
As visitors arrive onto the Campus Plaza, their initial impression of Mercedes-Benz’s future is a surprise. A glimmering ring of glass—pure and sensual, timeless and inviting, mysterious and open—sits high upon the new Sculpture Garden, overlooking the Plaza’s fountain and trees in a dramatic cantilever. The Future Lab seems to be rotating as the changing light of sun and clouds glides across its rounded, ribbed façade.
From the Campus Plaza, the building’s dramatic cantilever announces the Future Lab’s Foyer.
Drawn into the Foyer by views of the light-filled Future Garage, the visitor is met by a reception/ticket counter and cloak room. To the left is the White Cube art gallery and to the right are the Milk Bar and a direct entrance to the Lecture Hall. This configuration enables use of the White Cube, Milk Bar, and Lecture Hall for events independent of the Experience-the-Future and Create-the-Future.
Connected directly to the main Foyer, the Lecture Hall’s events can be viewed—invitingly—as soon as visitors enter the building by means of a retractable, acoustic wall.
Past the Future Lab’s ticket counter and control point, visitors enter the lift at the core of the Future Garage. In this exciting ascent to Level 3, they are immersed in the future of Mercedes-Benz, surrounded by the Garage’s ten levels of research cars.
The Future Lab’s public orientation/circulation backbone is the Future Garage, the high-rack storage tower mentioned earlier. Visible at all times within the building, its revolving display draws visitors to the presence of the public elevators and grand stair clustering around it. The Future Garage also doubles as a service lift delivering vehicles and exhibits to the gallery levels above.
From the Experience-the-Future hall on Levels 3 and 2, visitors can take the slow ramp that spirals around the Future Garage down to the Create-the-Future hall and ultimately back down to the Foyer.
To provide a dynamic canvas on which exhibition designers and curators can operate freely, the Experience-the-Future gallery space is divided into two distinct atmospheres whose architectures offer radically different spatial experiences. The Near Future and Far Future are choreographed in counterpoint within these atmospheres by four movable, double-sided Media Screens.
One atmosphere is the 75 m diameter Horizontal Plateau with an average height of 7.5 m. A luminous ceiling lights the Plateau uniformly and softly, creating the ideal setting for the display of vehicles and media-based exhibits. With only eight columns in the space, a floor that can support heavy loads, and an under-floor air supply system, the Horizontal Plateau enjoys ultimate flexibility. Its shape enables curatorial variety as a single, linear course around its perimeter or as four distinct quadrants, and manifold combinations and permutations of the two.
Three Vertical Silos penetrating the Horizontal Plateau to a height of 12.5 m compose the other atmosphere. The Silos land on Level 2 in a large, round room forming a continuous spatial ensemble. Providing societal, technological, and systemic provocations, the Vertical Silos are conceived as stages supporting the use of mise-en-scène, art, and cultural productions. They include a theatrical ceiling grid on which new media technologies can be rigged or heavy objects suspended.
Wrapping around the perimeter of each Silo, circular ramps provide diverse vantage points of that stage’s production. Connecting the Horizontal Plateau on Level 3 to the Vertical Silos’ base on Level 2, these ramps encourage visitors to break and challenge the exhibition sequence curated on the Horizontal Plateau above.
Within these contrasting atmospheres, four Media Screens manage the simultaneous interplay between the Near Future and Far Future without restricting free movement from one to the other.
The Media Screens can move to form six radically different configurations, including their complete retraction into the roof.
Movement or retraction of the Screens create transgressive ‘future moments’—unexpected disruptions when the visions of the Far Future bleed into and challenge the innovations presented in the Near Future—that culminate the spirit of the Future Lab for the visitor.
From Level 3, visitors descend to the galleries on Level 2 along the Silos’ ramps. The views up into the Silos engage their imagination with artifacts suspended against a backdrop of the animated Media Screens above. It is a world unto its own, a world of performance, research, and beauty, the future of Mercedes-Benz.
As visitors descend from Level 2 down the Future Garage ramp to the Create-the-Future on Level 1, they transition from receiving information to actively participating in the instigation of ideas. Whereas the Experience-the-Future is literally and metaphorically ‘elevated’ to project the potential and indeterminacy of the future, the Create-the-Future is ‘grounded’ upon the new landscape, such that the visitor relates and applies the insights gained above to their everyday world outside.
Level 1 Plan
Upon entering the Create-the-Future, visitors are greeted by its four unique pavilions: Workshop (a ‘marketplace for ideas’), Genius workshops (a kid’s Waldorf-education environment), Lab (an incubator for vehicle prototypes), and Lecture Hall.
A grand ramp connects the Create-the-Future directly down to the Foyer, affording them both independence from the Experience-the-Future hall.
Past the Foyer’s White Cube gallery, patrons see the exclusive Club Lounge overlooking the Classic Collection: Mercedes-Benz’s prized array of its most exceptional cars.
The Future Lab’s glass facade aspires to be innovative, sublime, and timeless. Its curves are highlighted as light glides upon its precise, undulating, transparent skin—an homage to Mercedes-Benz’s elegant car body designs—giving it a continuously changing, tactile quality. Its contents are hidden and revealed in a dance of veils that follows the sun. It gives shape to a brilliant and inviting object in the daytime and disappears at night to show off its contents. Embodying Mercedes-Benz’s motto—The best or nothing—its beautiful, ever-unfolding, and transforming quality is paralleled by the façade’s high performance and innovative technology.
The double-skin façade combines high thermal insulation with maximum natural daylight and winter solar heat gain to reduce mechanical loads. Two glazing layers, and the naturally aerated space between them, provide a flexible, intelligently-controlled ventilation strategy, as well as sunshading, glare control, and solar thermal collection shielded from the exterior environment. Intake and exhaust vents at the base and head of the wall, respectively, bring outside air into the raised floor plenums, enabling natural and mixed mode ventilation, reducing cooling and heating loads.
The external glazing layer is comprised of cold formed, double-curved, laminated, low-iron glass panels, pre-bonded to extruded aluminum glazing cassettes and mechanically fastened to horizontal, structural steel ‘T’ mullions. A single panel shape is applied in a repeating, alternating pattern to compose the facade, decreasing construction costs.
The internal glazing layer is composed of triple-glazed units with two triple-silver, low-e coatings and argon gas fillings. A base-supported, mullion-less framing system with movement loads accounted for at the head, enables the units to span floor-to-floor.
The aggregate window-wall U-value is 0.70 W/m2K with a high SHGC of 0.50 to allow for solar heat gains during the winter.
On the office facades of Level 2, a brise-soleil of vertical hydro-thermal tubes on the southern half provides 650 MWh/yr of solar heating. The tubes’ geometry is repeated on the northern half to provide glare control and aesthetic continuity.
The roof is surfaced with innovative triple glazed, super-insulated, translucent glass units (IGUs) specifically developed for the Future Lab.
The IGUs’ outer pane incorporates unique, silver-colored LOFTM C-CellTM solar cells, which form an 85% opaque screen over the entire roof and produce 566 MWh/yr of energy per year. The solar cells are glazed to the unitized ‘skylight’ panel by a factory assembled cassette system to facilitate removal, replacement, and maintenance. Within the cavity of the IGUs’ inner pane is a 100 mm layer of Okagel, a light diffusing and sound-attenuating nanogel insulation that achieves a U-value of 0.18 W/m2K.
Daylight penetrating the small gaps between the silver solar cells filters through the nanogel, the roof’s structure, and finally a ‘laylight’ layer of translucent glass to create a naturally luminous ceiling in the Experience-the-Future’s Horizontal Plateau.
This innovative combination of new technologies saves and produces energy, while offering a unique, glare-free lighting experience. The ceiling cavity between the IGU and laylight layers serves as a heat recovery plenum drawing warm air across the cavity to be returned through eight duct risers integrated within the primary structure’s eight columns.
The Future Lab’s crystalline transparency is enabled by an undulating curtain in the façade’s cavity that wraps around the building’s perimeter. Half of the curtain is comprised of integrated photovoltaic cells forming a near black-out sunshade; glare control fabric that allows views to the outside composes the other half.
The use of shading reduces the SHGC from 0.50 to 0.13. When deployed partially or in full, the curtain significantly reduces incident solar heat gain.
The photovoltaic sunshade/glare control curtain wraps into a large circle around the perimeters of Levels 1 and 3. The circular curtain occupies the cavity of the building’s double-skinned façade to protect it from the exterior environment. Heat build-up in the cavity is purged to the exterior by balancing the rate of air delivery, rate of heat gain, and effective vent area through the frame and gaskets.
The curtain is programmed to track the sun’s rotation to optimize interior shading and solar energy collection. The Future Lab thereby provokes visitors’ perception of the future as its contents are masked and revealed throughout the day by the rotating photovoltaic sunshade/glare control curtain.
At choreographed moments, the curtain can also be lifted entirely to expose the Future Lab’s contents to the surrounding campus.
Curtain deployed, sunshade portion to left, glare control portion to right
Overall, the Future Lab creates a recognizable brand epicenter that combines the potential and indeterminacy of the future with the classical, high-performance qualities everyone expects of a Mercedes-Benz product. A catalyst for debate and progress, the Future Lab is a tool for charting the course of the brand’s future, and sets the new Mercedes-Benz campus as a center where technological innovations can trigger societal change.
Image Credits: 1, 4, 9, 15, 17, 27, 29, 32 , 33, 44, 45: Luxigon