OFFICE BUILDINGS

Dear Readers,

The bad news first: Rising interest rates, expensive building materials and the ongoing trend of working from home are significantly affecting the number of building permits for office buildings – they are declining. According to the Federal Statistical Office, by 16.6 percent over the past two years – bad news for the construction industry. The good news: There is a wealth of retail spaces, industrial buildings and aging offices that have become available, meaning there is no shortage of space or ideas for attractive, identity-generating, individual office spaces. A prime example of how a family and company history can be told through interior and architectural design by repurposing a historical family villa and adding a new extension can be seen in Schalksmühle, which I had the opportunity to visit. After a competition led to the appointment of the young Hanover-based architectural firm Nehse + Gerstein, the complex construction project was now officially inaugurated. Vorarlberg architects Innauer Matt made use of an architecturally valuable existing building to create their own office space, as did guaja.cc + facury for the Greenpeace headquarters in Sao Paulo and Gisbert Pöppler in his Berlin studio. The upgrading of existing buildings and the potential for repurposing are increasingly leading to a circular use of building materials, which, according to Andrea Herold and Prof. Tina Kammer of interior.Park from Stuttgart in their article “New Aesthetic”, must go hand in hand with a shift in aesthetic expectations. Dominik Reding suspects that new ideas are necessary to address the imbalance between new office buildings and the construction of social housing, and he questions a good friend, former Federal Minister of Construction, Reinhard Klimmt, about this. “You just have to want to do it,” Klimmt says from page 66. Recent updates to accident prevention regulations have led to an increase in the construction of new fire stations. That’s why we have for the first time turned our series “Three …” into “Four …”. In this October issue of AIT, we once again take the opportunity to welcome the first-year students of interior design and architecture programmes. We are delighted with their decision and will support all those who register with their enrolment certificate at pstephan@ait-online.de with a free one-year AIT subscription. Warm welcome!

Best wishes
Petra Stephan, Dipl.-Ing.
Chief Editor
Architect