FC Campus Office and Administrative Building in Karlsruhe, Germany

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Reinforced Concrete Building

The reflective blue windows are the project highlight, not only visually but also technologically: The FC Campus is the world's first office building with operable liquid crystal windows where the translucency can be adjusted electronically.

Structure

The two cubes each have a total of six stories (the 1^st through the 5^th floors  are located on a common and considerably larger underground parking level ["base"]). The base spans the entire open parking space level and includes cantilevered reinforced concrete slabs point-supported on columns.

The floors are designed as wide-span point-supported reinforced concrete slabs.

For maximum ceiling thickness reduction (due to the high punching loads), Geilinger frames ("Europilze") manufactured by the Spannverbund company are utilized in the ceilings above the internal columns. Additionally, to achieve slender column cross-sections for architectural reasons (for example, column diameter at the first floor: d = 10.75 inches), Geilinger composite columns are used.

In addition to the reinforced concrete walls in the building core as well as the external walls, the vertical load transfer is largely taken over by the concrete columns.

Due to the poor soil conditions, the foundation of the building is supported on deep bored piles.

Each respective internal core, the interior walls, and the exterior reinforced concrete walls integrated in the facade all contribute to the structure's lateral stiffness. The seismic design was performed in the Dlubal software programs RFEM + RF-DYNAM Pro according to the multi-modal response spectrum analysis while considering several mode shapes. RFEM allowed for the seismic consideration with the complex geometry of the supporting reinforced concrete exterior walls. This was especially important with regard to the seismic design and the reduction of the torsional effect of the two cubes.

The modeling was initiated with prepared CAD plans imported as a .dxf file format, which could be applied concurrently to the horizontal floor plans as well as the vertical exteriors.