A BETTER WAY OF WORKING

A wealthy industrialist client who likes to house his factory in top quality architecture . . . it’s too good to be true, isn’t it? Not in Germany, where Anglo-German practice Wilford Schupp continues to design for B Braun

Words Hugh Pearman | Photos Roland Halbe

‘It’s only once in an entrepreneur’s lifetime that you can start something completely new like this,’ says Professor Ludwig Georg Braun, chairman of the mighty B Braun company and one of Germany’s richest men, gesturing to the 27ha campus which houses his factory. It’s a formidable industry – B Braun, which began life as a family pharmacy in the central German town of Melsungen in 1839, is a multinational manufacturer and distributor of medical equipment now. But it’s still a family firm, and that’s why he has created this complex, which is high architecture as well as being so efficient that he competes directly with China’s low labour costs. Professor Braun thinks long-term. This is why Michael Wilford and Manuel Schupp are in the room with him.  Braun is expanding his empire, starting right back here in Melsungen.

We are in the purpose-built factory complex masterplanned and built by James Stirling, Michael Wilford and Walter Nägeli, opening in 1992 shortly before Stirling’s untimely death. Designed with expansion in mind, this has duly taken place, phase after phase, at intervals ever since. A new €10.7m main European headquarters block opened in 2001, the warehousing/distribution centre has expanded, and now the latest E26m extension – the linear production building itself, the actual factory ­– has been extended forward and ‘completed’ with a new visitor centre topped with a projecting peak of a roof. What next for this most cordial of client-architect relationships?

Partners Wilford and Schupp, with project architect Martin Braun (no relation) are taking part in two days of workshop sessions with Prof Braun and his directors. On the agenda are not only a clutch of further buildings to complete the build-out of the original Melsungen masterplan, but other live projects in Penang, Malaysia, and Hanoi, Vietnam, both also designed by the practice. Braun is also thinking about Indonesia, but in the meantime, he’s not forgetting the roots of his business.

Anyone in Britain under the impression that Michael Wilford had effectively retired from architecture when he quit his London office in 2000 should think again. Now 71, Wilford is a busy man, the Stuttgart-based practice of Wilford Schupp is 20-strong and very active. What is true is that – following a hectic few years between Stirling’s death and the millennium, and the completion of such high-profile projects as The Lowry in Salford and the British Embassy in Berlin – Wilford re-thought his modus operandi. He favoured working in a small team, as he had in the early days with Stirling, and was disenchanted with commercial architecture and the British PFI system. So he collaborated happily on cultural projects between 2000 and 2003 with his former senior employees Stuart McKnight, Simon Usher and Gillian McInnes, collectively known as MUMA (RIBAJ, January 2010), who are now well-established in their own right. Meanwhile his former British practice was bought out in 2001 by two former partners, Laurence Bain and Russell Bevington. Based in Richmond in Surrey, Bain+Bevington Architects keeps a low profile.

Wilford does run his own one-man British practice, but right now it is the thriving German side of the business that is taking up most of his time. Key to this is his co-MD Schupp, who had worked with Stirling and Wilford since 1987 in both London and Stuttgart. In 2001 the new practice of Wilford Schupp was set up on an Anglo-German basis. A third director, Stephan Gerstner, completes the management line-up. Meanwhile Wilford had built himself and family a new house and studio in the remote heart of Ashdown Forest in Sussex. From there he contributes electronically but is often travelling, and with a client like Braun you need to. There is no recession in the medical-equipment business – people need treatment whatever the economic climate, and with an ageing population more than ever.

Prof Braun first commissioned Stirling Wilford in 1987, having seen the then-new Staatsgalerie in Stuttgart. Most industrialists would have plumped for a factories specialist, but Braun reasoned that the conservation requirements of a modern art gallery were not so different from the clean-room requirements of his proposed factory – and that the architecture was a lot more interesting. As a private company boss he was free to build what he liked, without the public-company year-end pressure to do everything as cheaply as possible. Yes, he says, his buildings are more expensive than the norm – a shade under 10% more, he thinks. But this is a tiny cost relative to what he spends on the advanced equipment inside them, especially given the long building lifespans he expects. And the public profile the architecture gives his company is priceless. Braun has become something of a national hero as a business progressive, and it’s easy to see why: in Britain, only James Dyson comes close. He has just won the German version of the ‘client of the year’ award.

In consequence, the numbers of sightseers turning up has steadily increased, 10,000 last year. When extending the linear production building recently, Braun expanded the commission to include a visitor centre. The day I visit, he’s just briefed the Wilford Schupp team on the next step: a dedicated visitors’ entrance and car park. It’s not an indulgence – many of the visitors are families of employees or prospective employees. Braun doesn’t see this as a factory. For him it’s a ‘city of industry’, and a city should be open to the public. He jokes that his security guards were aghast when he told them to leave the barriers open.

Having originally been commissioned as a non-industrial architect, of course Wilford Schupp has over 22 years become preternaturally attuned to Braun’s super-efficient manufacturing and distribution business. ‘We know each others’ minds almost intuitively,’ says Wilford.  There have been hiccups in the relationship – there was a time when Prof. Braun was away in Berlin, heading Germany’s equivalent of the CBI, and the directors who took over commissioning did not share his fascination with the Stirling-Wilford-Schupp design approach. The practice had to watch satellite campuses built by others to either side of their original scheme, retaining only the lightest of consultancy roles. But at least these new schemes kept a respectful distance, and now the boss is back in Melsungen, Wilford Schupp is back by his side.

The campus is maturing nicely.  The original Stirling-Wilford-Nägeli set piece behind a lake, with its timber enclosed walkway scuttling across the front of the (concealed) car park spine wall to link factory and admin blocks, is developing its intended patina. Its copper ages, rough external concrete acquires algae, and creepers grow over it. Of course the complex’s use of pre-patinated copper ‘shingles’ as a cladding material in several places is now mainstream to the point of cliché, but back in the early 1990s it was revolutionary. Prof. Braun laughs and says he wishes he’d patented the application.

The later ‘A2’ admin building which offsets the geometries of circle and triangle, rather like the No.1 Poultry building in London, is in immaculate condition. The original warehouse building has expanded in the original materials – the new section is visibly slightly lighter. Most recently the linear factory building, column-free inside, has been extruded forwards, its roof terminated with an oversailing peak marking the visitor centre at the western end. The new portion is in structural steel rather than the original concrete – to be able to take increased loadings – but the aesthetic is maintained and developed. One of the unifying decorative interior elements – concrete walls softened with sponge-applied colour – recurs in the visitor centre. There’s more than a touch of Behrens’ 1909 AEG turbine factory in the form of the building, but this is coincidence according to Wilford.

A stroll inside this building, with its smoothly-whirring machinery fed by stainless steel raw-material hoppers set into the rhythm of the building’s bays, reveals an impressively efficient manufacturing process, all painstakingly explained in the visitors’ viewing gallery. The new end elevation replaces a temporary original end façade. But although the factory is designed to extend much further in the other direction, this may not be necessary as today’s machinery is much more compact. Accordingly, Wilford Schupp intends to use some of the leftover expansion space for a new workers’ council building.

The masterplan, in fact, is filling out well. The multi-level car park is about to double in size as planned and will plug into the pedestrian access slots left for that purpose in the original spine wall. The triangular works canteen overlooking the lake will have repeated elements added, turning it into a typically Wilfordian zig-zag composition. Other new elements will be grafted on as required. And once this clutch of additions is done, says Wilford, that will pretty much be that for this campus. There will always be modifications and refurbishments, but the original 1987 masterplan will be built out.

The one thing not originally envisaged – but which has comfortably been accommodated – is large numbers of public visitors. B Braun is the focus of great regional pride in the state of Hesse, as a showpiece for the new Germany. Originally built close to the East German border to take advantage of state tax breaks, today it is right in the centre of reunited Germany, and benefiting accordingly.

I ask Schupp about how it feels to be an Anglo-German partnership, a rare breed including Sauerbruch Hutton and Bolles+Wilson. He jokes – though with an underlying seriousness – that some countries in Europe are still uncomfortable about employing Germans, despite apparent EU openness, and that the Wilford-Stirling patrimony helps in overcoming that.  ‘We can do both,’ he says, ‘The strict German and the English gentleman.’ It is apparent that one thing all these practices have in common is very little work in the UK. But then again, why would you need that, when conditions are that much more favourable in Germany and other European nations?

In Germany, these big family-run firms take a long-term view. Another Wilford Schupp client, the Sto paints and renders group in Bavaria, behaves similarly, as does Grimshaw’s industrial client Igus in Cologne. These are efficient, profitable, R&D-led companies that see great virtue in good architecture. UK plc should watch and learn. There IS another way. Wilford Schupp’s continuing work with B Braun is ample proof.