Designed as a vertical campus, the German Pavilion unites nature and technology. Formally, the design features a free-form roof that efficiently encloses stacked, floating cubes accommodating exhibition and event spaces within the volume of space.
The rear part of the building serves as the backbone with technical facilities and service functions, while exhibition and restaurant areas are layered horizontally around an open atrium at the front.
Three concrete cores serve as the stiff structural elements that transfer all horizontal loads to the pad foundations. All floors are composed of economical and efficient composite slabs.
The balance and stiffness of the staggered exhibition cubes is achieved by steel trusses inside the perimeter walls of each cube with a direct load path to the ground. Two of these incorporated columns extend to the top and support the roof along with the two cores in the back. Four primary main roof trusses allow for large cantilevers and create architectural image of the floating cubes.
A free-form ceiling grid structure suspended from the roof is located partially inside and outside the building envelope, which is designed to be as transparent as possible using a single-layer ETFE film and pre-stressed steel cables. Like the roof, Level 1 provides another architectural landscape. The curved, free-form plinth structure is supported by slender columns connected to the cantilevered steel frames.
