Descripció BMW Plant Leipzig – Central Building:
The Central Building is the nerve-centre of the whole factory complex with all the building’s activities gathering and branching out again from here. The knot connects the three main manufacturing departments of Body-in-White, Paint Shop and Assembly while serving as the entrance to the plant. The whole expanse of this side of the factory is oriented and animated by a force field emanating from the central building. All movement converging on the site is funnelled through this compression chamber squeezed in between the three main segments of production. Such planning strategy applies not only to the cycles and trajectories of workers and visitors but also the production line, which traverses this central point. This dynamic focal point of the enterprise is visually evident in the proposed dynamic spatial system that encompasses the whole northern front of the factory and articulates the central building as a point of confluence and the culmination of various converging flows. The central area as a “market place” is intended to enhance communication by providing staff with an area with which to avail themselves of personal and administrative services. This organisation of the building exploits the obvious sequence of front-to-back for the phasing of public to quiet activities.
The primary organising strategy is the scissor-section connecting the ground floor and first floor in a continuous field. Two sequences of terraced plates, like giant staircases, step up from north to south and from south to north capturing a long connective void between them. One cascade commences close to the public lobby overlooking the forum to reach the first floor in the middle of the building. The other starts with offices at the south end moving up to meet the first cascade then moving all the way up to the space projecting over the entrance. At the bottom of this void is the auditing area as a central focus of everybody’s attention. Above the void open to view the half-finished cars are moving along their tracks between the various surrounding production units. The cascading floor plates are large enough to allow for flexible occupation patterns. The advantage here lies in the articulation of recognisable domains within an overall field. With a global field, it opens up to visual communication more possible than with a single flat floor plate.
The integration of workers is facilitated by an overall transparency of the internal organisation. The mixing of functions avoid the traditional segregation of status groups. A series of engineering and administrative functions are located within the trajectory of the manual workforce’s daily movements. White collar functions are located both on ground and first floor. Equally Blue Collar social spaces are located on both floors thus preventing the establishment of exclusive domain.
The intrinsic problems of a large car-park in front of a building were avoided by turning it into a dynamic spectacle in its own right. The inherent dynamism of vehicle movement and the ‘lively’ field of car bodies is revealed in the arrangement of parking lots which let the whole field move, colour and sparkle with swooping trajectories culminating within the building. Here cars swoop underneath, setting down visitors into the glazed public lobby allowing views deep into the building.