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The Melsungen complex, in Stirling’s own words, indicates
the ways in which, as architects, he and his colleagues felt, ‘We
thought our design, if anything, should respond to those man-made
objects in the campagna — elements in the landscape such as
viaducts and bridges, canals and embankments. Also avenues of trees
and the straight edges of forests against fields. This 45-hectare
site extends from the southern slope of a valley to the top of a
small hill which, although only 10 metres higher than its surroundings,
forms a visual interruption between the lower part of the site and
the town… The valley shape suggested two levels of circulation
and we proposed a large multi-storey car park in the middle of the
site, accessible via an enclosed footbridge to the edges of the
terrain and linking important parts of the factory. Which makes
an architectural image for the place, like those modern road viaducts
which contrast with the landscape and complement it in a dramatic
way; there are many of them to be seen in this part of Hesse (Germany)’.
This footbridge, ‘like a giant centipede marches across the
site’. Stirling adds, ‘the front zone is designed like
an open jardin anglais with a tree-lined canal in the form of a
river cascade, a bubbling lake, and stepped terraces and ‘tree
henges’.
In the rolling hills just outside the small town of Melsungen,
the Braun complex is approached from the western side. The long
bridge is apparent immediately, with its stained timber structure,
from a distance, a remarkable expanse. The administration building,
is carefully positioned astride the small 10-metre high knoll to
the left (west) of the elevation, its status unmistakable there,
compared with the remaining works and distribution centre. The ‘drive’
, as with a ‘Capability’ Brown carriageway, breaks into
the landscape from the main road and runs with gentle curves past
the lake itself.
On the other side, at the end of the long pedestrian bridge, the
triangulated pavilion of the canteen is prominent against the mass
of the larger production building. To the east, and partly hidden
by the bridge, the great artificial convex mound of the distribution
and dispatch building, green-tinged, establishes its own correlation
with the surrounding landscape, a kind of parenthesis of its own
existing conformation
Set in the green fields and woods, Stirling here provides a scheme
capable of further extension, but always in sympathy with the existing
landscape context.
In fact, the architects were relieved to design again, so long
after the cancellation the masterpiece for Olivetti, within the
precedents of the 20th century modern movement, and of a functional
tradition, and its actual rejection of history: Stirling himself
referred here to hoping to have achieved an ‘unmonumental lightness
of being’.
But of course there was history in the chosen context, a long-remembered
landscape memory, indeed a resurgence of the landscape ‘sublime’
and English 18th century precedent: not for the first time taken
up enthusiastically on the continent.
Melsungen is an extraordinary integration of architecture with
landscape site. Such is the massive scale of the Braun complex,
which manufactures here plastic medical products, distributing these
all over Germany from this site, that it is remarkable how Stirling
and Wilford, with Nageli, were actually able to harmonise such a
sheer volumetric mass with the surrounding countryside. Here was
an essentially metropolitan practice (and Nageli’s own association
went back as far as 1979 when the three collaborated in Berlin)
which pulled off the trick in one sweep. There is an urbanism about
the headquarters buildings, with their own piazza and infrastructure
linkages (as further extended in 2000) which is essentially mainstream
Stirling and Wilford. But the disposition if the masses elsewhere
is ingenious. In dividing the site, rather than becoming embedded
within it, and drawing upon the functional tradition of bridges
and viaducts it became possible to establish a clear hierarchy of
building blocks, of all kinds of use, and to draw upon landscape
history to reconcile these insertions with the rural expanse and
its own inherent harmonies.
In 2001 Michael Wilford was invited to make further additions to
the work previously completed with Sir James Stirling. These changes
are now completed. A building comprising three main elements, the
two storey rectangular base, a three-storey triangular office block
and entrance hall and lobby together with a separate central core
were evolved, together with a bridge connection. Staff still arrive
via the existing office building — steel clad in aluminium
— which leads out to the central entrance hall on the second
floor now. This core is lit through a glass-roofed lightwell. The
new copper-clad building with its inclined walls correlates neatly
in materials with the actual base of the existing administrative
building. Linear hallways now lead to the office area along the
façade and so to the service areas within. Two glass elevators
open towards the lightwell and so neatly link up this entrance hall
to the three office floors of the main building. On these floors,
circulation is structured around the main lightwell. The exterior
walls of the triangle itself adjoin these transparent office zones.
The main triangular building is clad in sand-blasted stainless steel,
but incorporating the coloured window reveals of the original building.
Air conditioning for the whole building is distributed through the
whole complex. The stair itself is clad in Staffordshire blue bricks
imported from England. Already the inherent flexibility of the scheme
has been tested and emerged successfully, since Braun AG, the clients
decided to incorporate a hot-desking system for staff. The workspaces
are linked to enclosures or cockpits for small teams and individuals
requiring a measure of privacy. The project as now completed remains
in the spirit of the original Stirling/Wilford/Nageli concept, Meanwhile
the landscape has matured more rapidly than was first envisaged,
so fulfilling , with the lake, these aspirations first developed.
There has been much debate since the death in a hospital accident
of Sir James Stirling as to which members of each office group or
team contributed, how much and when. This is inevitable in the aftermath,
and yet these late additions demonstrate that the sensitivity about
architectural detailing which Stirling imparted to all he worked
with has been successfully carried through by all those still involved,
especially by Michael Wilford himself. Others involved were: Manuel
Schupp, Chris Dyson, Claudia Murin, Charlie Sutherland, Axel Overath,
Boiri Csicsely, Denis Wolf, Martin Braun, and Frauke Goldammer.
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