Kassel Town Hall “K” Wing

There’s cer­tainly plenty of scope these days for dis­cussing ways in which ex­ist­ing ar­chi­tec­tural assets can be pre­served. What’s really needed is a main­stream dis­course cen­tring upon the issues of con­ver­sion, re­pur­pos­ing and just how vital it is that grey energy be saved. Even if build­ings don’t seem to be worth pre­serv­ing on aes­thetic grounds or are tech­ni­cally out-dated, it usually makes eco­log­i­cal sense to convert them instead of de­mol­ish­ing them and build­ing some­thing new in their place. Ar­chi­tects for future are even calling for a mora­to­rium on de­mo­li­tion work.

The old “K” wing to Kassel’s town hall – a 1970s’ ex­ten­sion to a struc­ture built in the his­tori­cist manner in 1909 – used to be a prime case of a dis­tinctly un­al­lur­ing, bleakly grey office block that many may have felt little urge to leave stand­ing. Now, however, it has been lent a friendly new ap­pear­ance by the Bolwin | Wulf ar­chi­tec­tural prac­tice in Berlin. Though the build­ing’s outer façades were com­pletely re­placed in the process, its basic struc­tural iden­tity has nev­er­the­less been re­tained.

The edifice in ques­tion is a hor­i­zon­tal block more than 360 feet long and made up of from nine to twelve floors. “Our blue­print pro­vides the “K” wing with a bal­anced sense of scale, an amenable feel and a face of its own,” is how the ar­chi­tects see their new version of the annexe, “prop­er­ties which – along with face-to-face in­ter­ac­tions between cit­i­zens and mu­nic­i­pal staff – are es­sen­tial pre­req­ui­sites for public ad­min­is­tra­tion in the world of today”.

The façade with its rec­ti­lin­ear sub­di­vi­sions is lent struc­ture and rhythm by broad, evenly dis­trib­uted window sec­tions. Their frames project from the façade to in­creas­ing degrees from the top down­wards, giving the mono­lithic struc­ture a moulded look. Most unusual, es­pe­cially for such a large admin block, is the coarse ren­der­ing visible on the build­ing’s ex­te­rior, in the ar­chi­tects’ words “applied in a de­lib­er­ately ir­reg­u­lar manner with a ‘breast drill’”. Its colour varies from old rose to rust-red de­pend­ing on the light, a scheme the ar­chi­tects bor­rowed from the orig­i­nal town-hall build­ing.

Cof­fered ceil­ings in the in­te­rior that were pre­vi­ously con­cealed are a par­tic­u­larly note­wor­thy feature. Now that they are open to view, they give a good im­pres­sion of how the build­ing was ac­tu­ally con­ceived whilst also adding extra height and char­ac­ter to its office spaces. El­e­ments from the orig­i­nal design have been in­cor­po­rated into the re­vamped 1970s’ build­ing wher­ever fea­si­ble, a case in point being its stair­case ban­is­ters.

The lift land­ings to the south and north of the build­ing are sep­a­rated from their cor­ri­dors by glazing, thus cre­at­ing a form of ex­tended lobby. The typical gloom of of­fi­cial cor­ri­dors has been tran­scended by fitting the offices leading off from them with glass doors. These are op­er­ated using a handle that has proved popular for re­fur­bish­ment and con­ver­sion jobs: the FSB 1035 model by Heike Falken­berg is a re­work­ing of an older handle design and as such forges a link between past and present.