German Cars and German Green Buildings: A Necessary Match?
This week I’m in Frankfurt talking to a group of 60 architects assembled by Somfy, a French manufacturer of dynamic building facades (exterior shades and shutters for high-rises), so I thought I’d venture 100 miles down the road to visit with David Cook, a partner at Behnisch Architekten in Stuttgart, best known as the home of Mercedes Benz. Behnisch completed the 350,000 sq.ft. LEED Platinum Genzyme building in Cambridge, Massachusetts in 2003, which still stands as a monument to an incredibly attractive, people friendly and high performance building. Behnisch almost always works closely from the outset of a project with a Stuttgart-based climate engineering firm, Transsolar Energietechnik. The collaboration has gone on all over the world for the past ten years and has produced some incredibly well performing, green, great-looking buildings. Good lessons in fostering creativity for American architects, who tend to keep their engineers on a tight leash.
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