High Point E – Franklin Village Mannheim, Germany

• 3D Viewer | Google
• 3D Viewer | Babylon
• Virtual Reality

1231x

Reinforced Concrete Residential High-Rise Building

The building's sculptural shape forms an "E", one of four letters in the word HOME. Turning the word into reality through a total of four different high-rise buildings is one of the creative guidelines of the FRANKLIN conversion project in Mannheim, Germany.

The complete ground and the first upper floor provide maisonettes with significantly larger floor plans than on the other upper floors. In addition to architectural reasons, this leads to the fact that the building is reduced inwards to a base area of 20 m x 48 m (65.6 ft x 157.5 ft). From the second floor upwards, the building's floor plan changes after every second or third floor due to those offsets. This leads to multi-story overhangs on both sides of the building. In the first basement floor, there are cellar rooms for rent in addition to underground parking spaces, whereas the second basement is used exclusively as an underground car park.

Structure

The apartment building, consisting of fifteen upper floors and two basement floors, will be constructed with concrete. The upper floor’s load-bearing exterior and interior walls will be made of reinforced concrete, while the exterior walls in the basement will be constructed with water-impermeable reinforced concrete. The floor slabs are made of biaxially stressed reinforced concrete with integrated ventilation ducts.

A large part of the main vertical load transfer as well as the transfer of the main loads from the floor cantilevers takes place via six shear walls arranged in the transverse axes. The exterior walls on the longitudinal side of the second upper floor include a unique structural feature. As these external walls are outside the load-bearing axes, they are decoupled from the load.

The two-story underground parking garage in the basement levels means that the load-bearing components are arranged in a large grid. Wide passages and necessary maneuvering radii restrict the arrangement options for columns and walls as structural load-bearing systems. However, the principal support system in the above-ground floors is largely congruent with the basement floor grid.

The required seismic design for the building, located in seismic zone 1, was carried out entirely in the RF-/DYNAM Pro add-on modules. The graphical output was an advantage, concerning the structure's natural vibrations, internal forces, and moments. Furthermore, the seismic design results were integrated into the main program, RFEM, where integral design and verification were possible for all design combinations.

The 3D structural modeling and analysis allowed the engineers to determine the result peaks and internal force maximum values. Therefore, problematic points could be discussed at a relatively early planning stage and reasonable solutions were found.

In addition to the structural challenges described above, the design's main focus was on thermal, noise, and fire protection requirements. Because of the cantilevered floor plans, a large number of loggias, balconies, and roof terraces were constructed. With these structural components, close coordination between all involved parties for static, structural-physical, and fire protection requirements was needed for an optimal design. The 3D model was particularly useful for the thermal insulation design considering the balconies and loggias.