Stylepark Gira
Elegant brand ambassador
The home installation technology specialist Gira has not only completely revised its brand appearance. The company also has a sensational new business card in terms of architecture: Sauerbruch Hutton, one of the most renowned German architectural offices, has built a new plant for Gira in Radevormwald. The development, administration, production, logistics and dispatch sections will all be relocating there. The architects have closely interwoven the offices and factory halls. The administration zones are now positioned directly on top of the production and warehouse areas. A mezzanine floor that with its large windows opens onto the halls, also features a conference zone that can be used by all sections alike.
The architects also allude to this interfacing of production and administration on the facades: Large dark fields visually link the office floors to the production halls below. With a rhythmic pattern Sauerbruch Hutton dissolve the outer walls into different color fields – a recurrent characteristic of their projects. For the new Gira plant, they have opted for a range of grey tones that depending on the respective surface reflects light differently, thus quite emphatically dematerializing the large building. On the one hand, the choice of color references the Gira corporate colors of black and white, making the building a striking public-space element of the corporate identity. On the other hand, says architect Matthias Sauerbruch, the idea was to avoid dominating the countryside and contributing to the visual chaos that sadly so typifies precisely many an industrial park. “Here, the aesthetic work definitely has to go in the direction of what I would term elegance. Elegance means making difficult things seem easy and finding economic solutions to complicated tasks.” This is a basic outlook that the architects certainly have in common with Gira.
