Binder Woodcenter
Matteo Thun & Partners, Italy
Internationally recognized, Matteo Thun was awarded the prestigious Compasso d’Oro prize three times. He has also won Good Design and Green Good Design Awards, as well as several Red Dot Awards, along many others.
The work of Matteo Thun & Partners focuses on sustainability, a self-supporting architecture, respecting the genius loci: an architecture combining long-lasting solutions, tradition, and new technologies; an architecture saving resources and generating measurable economic results, while contributing to beauty.
Binder is one of the leading European companies in the wood industry. The clean-cut and precisely designed new executive pavilion of the Kösching wood mill to the north of Munich, Bavaria, is surrounded by warehouses: an all-glass central section (the entrance hall) and four lateral constructions, made of alternating glass and wooden panels, wedged into the former to create a clean-cut H-shaped base and two inner courtyards, resulting in two quiet, dry gardens on either side of the foyer.
The first courtyard serves as a reception site; the second is more private. Together with the entrance structure, they form a transparent sequence, an axis of visibility opening onto the surrounding countryside. Another axis perpendicular to the first runs lengthways right across the central section: a sort of crossroads for the eyes with visual trajectories melding the transition between the inside and outside into a seamless flow of space. Everything is set beneath a large flat roof, a big wooden sheet with powerful overhangs, projecting over the courtyards like a wide-brimmed hat.
The building’s functionality is equally clear. Administration offices and spaces for holding conferences and seminars are contained in a single story office building that exploits, to the very last millimeter, the construction-perceptual properties of a very innovative kind of wood.
The entire building is actually made of BBS panels (Binder-Brettsperrholz), one of the leading products in the Binder catalog. The panels are large and very thick (27 cm) prefabricated sheets of multi-layered structural plywood (spruce and larch) made entirely of wood and geometrically combined in the least laborious way possible to form a versatile “raw material” for building.
Full-height coplanar glass panels alternate with BBS panels of the same size on the façade to form a lively pattern that frames the surrounding landscape: transparency and material combine to create an idea of contrast.
Originally appeared in Modus News 2
Matteo Thun & Partners
Architect and designer Matteo Thun was born in Bolzano (1952). He studied at the Academy of Salzburg before earning his degree in architecture in Florence in 1975. He was a co-founder of the Memphis group, the design movement that shaped events in the 1980s, and a partner of Sottsass Associati from 1980 to 1984.
From 1983 to 2000, he taught design at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna, and from 1990 to 1993, he served as creative director at Swatch. In 1984, he founded the studio Matteo Thun & Partners in Milan.
Matteo Thun Photograph by ©Francesca Lotti, plan by Matteo Thun & Partners all other photographs by Jens Weber