Aachen, Germany
RWTH Aachen WZL New Building Hall by Stefan Bielefeld of SSP AG is a new, technological sound machine tool hall for a German university that bridges the old with the new.
A fire caused the total loss of a machine tool hall of the RWTH Aachen.
An L-shaped adjacent part of the building remained intact due to the separation by a firewall.
The construction project comprises the construction of a new hall, and the renovation of the facade of the existing building.
RWTH Aachen WZL New Building Hall has recently been awarded a 2022 International Architecture Awards Honorable Mention by The Chicago Athenaeum: Museum of Architecture and Design and The European Centre for Architecture Art Design and Urban Studies.
In the course of a VgV procedure, SSP was awarded the contract for the integral general planning of the construction project.
The new hall building has dimensions of approx. 72 meters by approx. 43 meters and a height of approx. 13 meters.
The supporting structure consists of precast reinforced concrete elements and a steel framework.
Three openly interconnected hall bays each have a 20-ton crane runway.
Each hall nave is supplied with technical media via an underground duct.
There is a two-story building section that houses the building services (key data: Refrigeration system 400KW, RLT systems 40,000m³/h incl. WRG, three-phase busbars 1600A, compressed air system supply pressure 10 bar) and ancillary rooms (laboratory: eroding, oil storage, hazardous materials storage and gas cylinder storage).
In the laboratory hall there are 56 multifunctional research fields which can be supplied with flexible media (electricity, IT, compressed air, cooling water supply) as well as consumables (cooling lubricants).
Due to superheavy test setups, the load-bearing area of the building base is 100 kN/m².
Due to high dynamic loads at the machine stations, specific decoupling measures were planned with a building dynamics expert to prevent the introduction of secondary airborne noise.
Part of these measures is a building separation joint (heavy load profiles) which separates the new from the old building and prevents structure-borne sound vibrations from propagating through the soil and/or foundations.
As a sound insulation measure, approx. 330 square meters of acoustic wall absorbers were installed in the hall.
The building was designed using Building Information Modeling (BIM).
During the planning phase, the various models from the different disciplines were digitally coordinated and integrated.
The remaining L-shaped existing building is a 3-story building with dimensions of approx. 72 meters by 72 meters and with a building height of approx. 10 meters.
Both parts of the building have a facade on prefabricated reinforced concrete elements on the first floor and a curtain wall metal facade from the first floor upwards.
This is a 3.5 mm thick anodized rear-ventilated smooth sheet metal facade.
The design of the new facade through the use of a metal band connects old and new—the building material metal stands for the pictorial expression of the work of the institute WZL with this material.
A 36.00 m long steel lattice girder is clamped between two existing staircases.
This canopy serves the address formation and supplements the old building by means of two terraces providing hospitality possibilities in the open air.
The roof covering of the new hall is an extensively greened roof area with 28 skylight domes as smoke and heat ventilation systems.
Project: RWTH Aachen WZL New Building Hall
Architects: SSP AG
Lead Architect: Stefan Bielefeld
Design Team: Tim Hanke, Thomas Schmidt, Heiner Blum, Andreas Bischoff, Philip Wieland, and Alicja Kozub
General Contractor: SSP AG
Client: Bau-und Liegenschaftsbetrieb NRW
Photographers: Jörg Hempel and Thomas Schmidt
