Audi Regional Headquarters
Our design for the Audi Regional Headquarters building near Glasgow is set within a proposal for a new area of parkland. The barren site is transformed into an elegant yet striking Scottish landscape, with naturally occurring ground levels exploited to create areas of water and woodland.
The building is conceived as a translucent blade through which light and landscape flow. The plan and envelope are designed to benefit from maximum daylight and its interior terraced to present an exhilarating vantage from which to appreciate the new parkland.
The internal spatial organisation allows expansion and contraction of the modular floor plates to vary the balance of offices and exhibition space. The level changes occurring across the site permit vehicular access at low and intermediate level showrooms and workshops.
A new car owner celebrates their purchase by driving out of the showroom and across the water landscape, supported by a steel grille route just beneath the water level.
The parabolic structure proposed has the proportions and spirit of the early aircraft hangar, with the practical advantages of internal visibility, flexibility of use, value for money and speed of construction.
An adjustable ETFE pneumatic cladding enclosure is proposed to provide a responsive environmental control system. Active environmental controls augment the passive stack effect of the parabolic internal volume. The low weight of the pneumatic cladding panels allows the mass of the supporting structure to be kept to a minimum, minimising cost and embodied energy consumption. The rainwater collection services of the building are linked into a canal from where water is directed to collection lakes within the park.
While it was proposed as a building for a specific site, the building design can be treated as a generic solution to be adapted to other sites. Modification of the primary structure’s geometry permits the angle of inclination of the façade to respond to the solar orientation of the particular location.
