When you hear that Auer + Weber are building for the European Southern Observatory ESO, a cinematic association immediately springs to mind: that of James Bond. The office had already built a flat, square building for the ESO in the Chilean Atacama Desert. The building-turned-chameleon made of rust-red exposed concrete was the scene of an impressive explosion in the Bond film “Quantum of Solace”. It has, quite literally, burned itself in. Now Auer + Weber have once again built for the European Southern Observatory, albeit not in an extraterrestrial-looking desert 2600 meters above sea level, but in Garching near Munich. Things are less cinematic there.
Garching is something like the Silicon Valley of Upper Bavaria. It’s not just the Technical University of Munich that has relocated its high-tech campus there. Over 50 research institutions and research-related companies have settled on the extensive site. And now the extension to the ESO administration building has just been completed.
The existing building is a composition of circular segments that intersect at split levels. The striking building on the edge of the research site and in the middle of a nature reserve made its architects Fehlinger and Gogel famous beyond Germany’s borders at the time. It is therefore somehow logical that Auer + Weber pursued a completely different design approach here, on the green meadow at the edge of the forest, than in the desert. The extension is based on Fehling and Gogel’s circular grid: The three-part office building and the delivery and assembly hall nestle against the existing building with their concave shape and form a soft, organic transition to the adjacent Garching forest and meadow landscape.
The new building, which is connected to the existing building via a three-part bridge, was raised so that all views open out into the greenery and cars can park at ground level underneath the building. The anthracite-colored façade scales around the round shape of the building and reflects the surrounding park landscape in fragments. In terms of construction, the whole thing works using a complex, suspended bulkhead construction – actually an outdated system for office use. But ESO wanted it that way. The data obtained in Chile with the help of the giant telescope is analyzed in Garching. This is where real research is carried out by real minds, and they need space. The ESO in Garching has no interest in modern open-plan offices. So Auer + Weber planned small cellular offices, a high-tech cartouche with spacious and attractive meeting zones in between.
The ESO nerds obviously like it. Just a few weeks after completion, all the offices are occupied. The employees make themselves at home. The fixed glazing, through which the interior corridor is to be illuminated, has been covered with opaque panels. Pictures, posters, boards and mind maps hang on the walls. People obviously feel at home – there are even musical instruments in the space scientists’ thinking cells. A meeting hall and an auditorium were inserted as two-storey, rectangular components within the outer ring of office cells. The resulting circular segments form an atrium extending across all floors. You might not be able to film a Bond movie here, but it should be enough for a crime scene.
Photos: Roland Halbe