Bicola Europe Factory and storage Building
法国
Ricola Europe’s new factory building is located at an idyllic wooded site between the Rhine-Rhone Canal and the river Ill on the southern edge of the city of Mulhouse.
The building is to be used simultaneously as a factory and for storage. Its simple hall with flexible floor plan divisions offers the perfect solution.
The building’s form recalls a cardboard box lying on the floor with open flaps. The cantilevered extending roofs on the two long sides open up both to the landscape and to the entrance and loading areas for fork lifts and transport vehicles, as well they create shade and weather protection.
The short sides of the factory building are each closed by a black concrete wall. Water from the roof runs down over these black concrete walls and trickles into a deep bed of Alsatian gravel. The water running down the walls forms a fine film of plant life; a natural drawing ensues.
Both long walls are light walls providing the work area with constant, pleasantly filtered daylight. Light filtering occurs through printed translucent polycarbonate façade panels, a common industrial building material. Using silkscreen, these panels are printed with a repetitive plant motif based on photograph’s by Karl Blossfeldt.
The effect the panels have on the interior can be compared to that of a curtain – textile-like – that creates a relationship to the site’s trees and shrubs. Viewed from outside, the translucent printed panels on the façade and the extended roof again recall textiles – the lining of a dress or the inner padding of a box. If daylight diminishes, the printing is barely visible from outside and the material of the façade panels becomes much stronger. Their surfaces then seem rather closed and smooth, and their expression becomes more like that of the building’s concrete side walls.
Herzog & de Meuron, 1996
Awooded site between the Rhine-Rhone Canal and the River Ill in Brunnstatt, on the southern outskirts of the French town of Mulhouse, was chosen as the position for the second building commissioned by the Ricola company. Serving as both factory and warehouse for the firm’s famous throat lozenges, the building is a parallelepiped with flexible floor plan divisions. Two large eaves mark the long walls with an eight-metre projection from the facade. Like the flaps of a cardboard box, the roof projects out on one side towards the surrounding countryside, while on the other it shelters the open air loading bay area from the inclemencies of the weather.
Between two blind walls, four metal porticoes with a double span cover a 30 x 60 square metre area. The required functions – storage and production – led to a division of the floor plan by means of a longitudinal wall which encompasses the set of intermediate pillars and permits the thermal separation of the two spaces. Honeycombed polycarbonate, a common industrial building material, is a feature which characterizes the project. The longitudinal facades, the internal divider wall and the eaves soffit are clad in this lightweight, inexpensive, translucent material which is given a new dimension by a repeated silkscreen print of a photo by Karl Blossfeldt. The chosen plant motif, an eleven-leaf palm, assimilates this utilitarian construction with the wooded surroundings bestowing it with a textile quality as if it were a printed curtain. The changing effects of the light can make the surface print invisible from the outside, leaving the building looking like a compact unit marked by the grooved pattern of the honeycomb panels.
For the shorter sides of the building, the architects proposed a finish in two 35 cm deep headwalls that reproduces the section of the warehouse and its eaves. With no downpipes, the rainwater that falls on the vast roof flows freely down these walls into a bed of Alsatian gravel. Made in concrete stained with iron oxide the petreous enclosure thus becomes the spontaneous backing for a film of moss whose organic texture blurs the sharp angled precision of the prism. The strict modulation of the structure is stressed in elevation by five rectangular landscape display windows on the production facade and a further five loading bays on the opposite side where the company name is etched on the pavement.