The temporary Frankfurt Pavilion: walk-in book shelving for the Book Fair

摘要

Seen from outside a building covered with a white skin, beneath which the edges of the wooden segments that make up the load-bearing structure are visible as wave-like lines. Inside, however, it offers a bright space for the various events for the Frankfurt Book Fair.The temporary pavilion, which can be assembled just as easily as IKEA bookshelves, can accommodate 400 people.400 individual parts, around 75 m~3 of laminated veneer timber, a PVC membrane measuring 1,000 m~2 - to be transported by seven trucks. Is this an efficient and economical building method for a pavilion with a "lifespan" of just one week? Very much so: "We looked at various construction systems and materials and, on the basis of the specific requirements, we soon arrived at wood", explains Kai Otto from Schneider + schumacher (Frankfurt/ Vienna/Tianjin), the architecture office that designed and implemented the pavilion. The Frankfurter Buchmesse GmbH wanted a building that could be erected and dismantled in a short space of time and could be easily stored. An additional wish was that it should assert its symbolic presence on the large trade fair grounds.With wood this was possible. This material is flexible to work with, its weight is low in relation to its mass and structural capacity and, above all, it is renewable. The decision to use wood was reached in the framework of an interdisciplinary planning process with the architects, the structural engineers Bollinger + Grohmann Ingenieure, and the timber building firm Amann. Step-by-step the idea of accessible book shelving in the form of a protective cocoon - the design drawings by Till Schneider show three shell-shaped, inter-locking spatial "hulls" - was translated into a construction of wooden ribs. Using a parametric modelling program to implement the design allowed automated adjustments to be made continually and construction variations to be examined. This ensured savings in terms of both materials and costs.