Metallhandel Grassmayr

This facility is designed for a metal recycling company, which specialises in collecting and trading high-grade metals. Common industrial buildings for such operations are simple, large boxes covering about 2,000 square meters. Our clients were interested in an alternative solution instead of using this common design. Their staff preferred working outdoors and an entirely enclosed space would require complex ventilation systems to manage emissions from logistics trucks and heavy machinery.

Together with my team, I developed a wing-like structure that offers sheltered spaces suitable for their activities. The roof is designed to maximise sunlight during the colder winter months while mitigating noise emissions to the surrounding neighbourhoods. I provided all architectural services from site evaluation and preliminary studies to construction, completion and contract management.

Wing

The building for a metal recycling company in Innsbruck, Austria is designed to have a thin skin with minimal material demand that wraps around its functional layout and logistic requirements. The conceptual goal was to drape a flexible skin around a complex set of internal processes. The building’s surface is organised as a series of Z-shaped cross sections, which divide the space into an active zone where metal selection and considerable noise emissions occur, and into a quiet zone with the management office and a volume for future extensions. The cross-sections are adapted to different spatial situations, creating spaces for collecting, selecting, processing, financial transfers, monitoring the recycled metal markets, and supporting operations.

Thin Surface

Metal was the primary choice of material for the construction of the building skin due to the building’s function as a metal recycling company and its ability to be easily disassembled and reused. The building skin spans a distance of 18 metres and is constructed as a lattice truss. The material and assembly logic follows a conventional array of steel I-beam sections as primary trusses and smaller I-beam sections as a secondary construction layer. The secondary structure holds galvanised standing seam roof panels on top and galvanised stretch metal sheets on the bottom. The perforated stretch metal mitigates acoustic emissions through absorption and is faceted to disperse any noise reflections.

The tectonic appearance reveals the structural and construction logic through an interplay of disguise and revelation. Viewed from the front and beneath the roof, the construction is mostly hidden behind the smoothly curved stretched metal panels. The perforated sheets are unstable and soft until mounted onto the secondary system of steel beams. The orientation of the sheets is perpendicular to the steel structure and accentuates the sequential distribution of bent cross-sections. At the bottom front edge of the cross-section, the perforated panels reveal the primary structural system of I-beams that run across to the back folding diagonally downwards and resting on the linear foundations. The concrete foundations are expressed as a narrow plinth, which slightly elevates the roof off the ground. The whole wing-like roof structure rests more firmly on two concrete volumes that lean outwards to articulate a continuous flow of forces from the roof into the ground and on two Y-shaped steel columns. Strategic incisions into the surface allow spaces to penetrate the surface where required, providing visual connections and day lighting. At these moments of incision, the building skin almost dematerialises into an ultra-thin and highly accentuated surface, tailored, draped and deformed around differentiated spatial qualities.