Odense, Denmark
3XN, MOE, and HJ Landskab have won the competition to design Cobot Hub – the new joint home of Universal Robots (UR) and Mobile Industrial Robots (MiR) in Odense, Denmark.
The new 20,000 square meter hub for robotics is designed to enhance collaboration and employee well-being while offering highly specialized environments for robot research and development.
Driven by the building’s modular approach, the cubic volumes form a strong architectural expression and provide a flexible framework so that the building can be scaled up or down according to future needs.
This means that significant parts of the building’s structure and materials can be reshaped and reused.
The design team has developed a wooden construction with potential for future recycling. In addition to being aesthetically beautiful and living material, wood is great for indoor climate and stores CO2 throughout its life.
The design of Cobot Hub is based on the idea of a campus that includes open office landscapes as well as common areas and amenity spaces where employees can meet informally across the two organizations.
The purpose is to create spaces that improve employee well-being and where exchanges of knowledge, innovation, and creativity can flourish.
This has been solved by prioritizing several common areas and atriums that open the building up and create visibility and transparency and encourage social interaction and cooperation between people and departments.
Spatial qualities such as daylight and green areas also contribute to employee well-being.
The building’s low height allows it to blend into the surrounding green area.
A shared courtyard forms the heart of Cobot Hub and will become an important center of social life on campus.
Here employees can meet across organizations, while the two companies maintain their own ‘borders’ inside the building.
The name Cobot Hub derives from the robotics term “cobot” – a contraction of “collaborative” and “robots” – the type of robots that work in collaboration or interaction with humans.
Project: Cobot Hub
Architects: 3XN, MOE and HJ Landskab
Client: Universal Robots (UR) and Mobile Industrial Robots (MiR)
