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& nbsp; In close cooperation, facade specialist FKN and system house Hydro Building Systems developed two WICONA element facade applications for the 27,000 m2 customized facade application guaranteed on budget.

With the Tower 185 office tower, the dominant feature of the Europaviertel in Frankfurt am Main has grown to heaven. The developer of the project is Vivico Real Estate, which already demonstrated convincingly on the occasion of the pre-certification of the Tower 185 project by the German Sustainable Building Council (DGNB) with its silver seal of approval that in future only buildings with a high sustainability standard will successfully and sustainably assert themselves on the market could.

In addition, after completion of Tower 185, the client is aiming for gold certification according to the internationally renowned LEED seal of approval (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design).


The high-rise shows an aluminum-glass facade and it appears divided from top to bottom and turned outwards to give space in the middle to a completely glazed tower, the rotunda, on an oval floor plan. The architecture Tower 185 is the work of Prof. Christoph Mäckler Architects from Frankfurt am Main. The actual tower, which is made up of three segments, rises on a horseshoe-shaped base building.

Tower 185 is designed for offices and business premises for demanding users. According to the owner, the main tenant is the international auditing firm PwC (Pricewaterhouse-Coopers AG), which has rented 66,000 m² long-term. The six-storey base building also has retail and catering facilities.

The development and construction of the facades of the high-rise tower were in the hands of FKN Fassaden GmbH from Neuenstein and the system house Hydro Building Systems, the parent company for the WICONA facade systems. When designing their façades, the two partners had to take the various requirements of the omniCon contracted by Vivico into account:

  • the building physics requirements for a building over 200 m high,
  • the high thermal and acoustic insulation values to ensure sustainability and user comfort,
  • the timely assembly of the entire total area of over 27,000 m2 in the two high-rise halves and the polygonal rotunda in between, which was planned for just over a year, also over the winter months,
  • the extreme logistics conditions due to the cramped location in the city center of Frankfurt.

Together, the two partners developed two types of element facades. They are based on the constructions of the WICLINE window system and the WICTEC EL element facade system. The glass middle tower segment, the rotunda, is formed by polygonal special constructions based on the WICTEC mullion-transom facade in element assembly. With these two solutions, all technical, economic and ecological expectations could be met.

They even exceeded the required thermal insulation values and achieved a Ucw value of up to 1.3 W / m²K. Sound insulation was also able to achieve higher values than planned: 38 dB for the two high-rise halves closed by the aluminum-glass facade for airborne sound insulation (required: 32 or 36 dB) and 61 dB for longitudinal sound insulation for the glass rotunda 37 dB for airborne sound insulation (required: 32 dB) and 55 dB for longitudinal sound insulation.

Recurring elements and processes made it possible to plan the entire facade area efficiently. The reliable production took place under workshop conditions without the influence of the weather and at ideal temperatures. A consistently high level of quality was achieved. Effective logistics ensured just-in-time production, delivery and assembly with a small footprint on site.

Assembly using a new type of robot

For the Tower 185, the elements were developed in such a way that an innovation for a particularly safe and efficient assembly could be used: a new type of assembly robot that moves the elements from the inside of the respective floor level to the installation location. The individual elements are moved outwards by the robot through the bodyshell opening, rotated into the correct position, and then inserted. In this way, up to 20 of the almost 7 m2 large and 450 kg heavy elements could be installed every day and thus the schedule could be kept precisely over the entire winter months, even in difficult climate and wind conditions.

All of the individually tailored tests required for the special designs were carried out in one of the most modern test centers in Europe: WICONA's own test center in Bellenberg. There, facade segments up to 10 x 10 meters in size can be checked for air permeability according to EN 12153, static driving rain tightness according to EN 12155, dynamic driving rain tightness according to EN 13050, resistance to wind loads according to EN 12179, shock resistance according to EN 14019, and load-bearing capacity of fall-proof glazing according to TRAV. < / p>

This text is machine translated. To view the original German text, click on DE on the top right of this window

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