"This was already a very defining theme in the planning," says Gerhard Gramalla, Dipl.-Ing. (FH), architect and managing director at Huber Architekten. Because a black building is easy to plan and draw, but in the technical implementation there are many tricky issues: from very crucial ones like the design of the facade, which could heat up too much, to design details like the black window sill. But for all the questions were answered in the interaction between architect. Builder Johann Baptist Lell found satisfactory answers.
And so, since its completion in September 2008, the Mini dealership has been "really monumental, I'm super happy with it," says Lell happily. And the reactions of the customers? At first, some would have wondered about the "black box". But with every month that has passed, the voices have become more positive. Customers from all over the northern Upper Palatinate would gladly accept the journey to Schwandorf to get information here at the Mini dealership. "People now associate the Mini brand with the building," says Lell. The stand-alone solution in Schwandorf has also attracted a great deal of attention from the Group itself; they have a pioneering role in Germany. Elsewhere the Mini sales areas are often still directly connected to BMW car dealerships.
Creativity in a tight corset.
In 2007, Autohaus Lell had the courage to make a completely new investment in the Mini brand. For this, the approximately 10.000 square meters of land on the Industriestrasse on. There were almost no urban planning constraints there, but the group's specifications in terms of corporate identity were extensive. "To move within this corset and still get something creative out of it, that was the special challenge," says Gerhard Gramalla. "The themes of cube and black were predefined, but there was some freedom in the shape of the building. What we created together with the architect was the idea of pushing the building upwards," says Johann Baptist Lell. The small coffee bar with terrace was also a wish of the builder. "We want to make the customer's stay as comfortable as possible."A mini regulars' table also meets here regularly.
The space program for the mini car dealership was very tight: salesroom, toilets, coffee bar and a meeting room. The building was built on a five-by-five meter axis grid. Is a massive reinforced concrete skeleton building. Only one side of the facade is closed; on three sides, large glass surfaces within the black skeleton dominate the appearance. "The supporting structure can be read on the outside, you understand the building," says Gerhard Gramalla. The "crown", i.E. A third level of the black stand construction, which rises another three meters above the actual flat roof, also makes a decisive contribution to the monumental effect. Roof overhangs have been omitted in favor of the clarity of the facade.