The new compact and streamlined Centre for Virtual Engineering (CVE) is nestled in a corner plot of the Stuttgart University campus in Vaihingen. The Fraunhofer Institute for Industrial Engineering IAO, which researches the working world of the future, now has a new flagship building which houses four storeys of state-of-the-art offices, laboratories and demonstration centres. The creator of this new office building is none other than Ben van Berkel, who also designed another Stuttgart landmark, the Mercedes-Benz Museum.

The building blends easily and calmly into the landscape and campus. As an extension, the spatial connection to the old institute building works both visually and functionally. Over four storeys, with a usable area of more than 3200 square metres arranged around an open atrium, the CVE offers a range of work spaces, from individual mobile work stations to conference rooms, demonstration areas and a series of laboratories. Gently offset levels open up optical axes and create vistas – all in the name of interactive communication. When designing the façade, the developers used the virtual reality model which had already been created for calculating the volume of the building. In this way, the rounded building shape provides the optimum ratio of façade area to construction size. The proportion of glazed façade surfaces is thus just 32%. Schüco sawtooth windows with integrated Schüco CTB sun shading were used. One particular challenge was manufacturing the 38 different colours of the sawtooth window and façade units. They feature colour gradients in blue and orange, which indicate the different building functions in the interior – either laboratories or office workstations. The foyer façades in the entrance area were created with a Schüco mullion/transom system and fabricated as a special construction. This allows the double-axis, arched profiles to carry the curved glazing which is up to up to 4.5 metres high.