New offices built as part of Tübingen’s urban redevelopment

Bürogebäude Güterbahnhof is a business complex designed and built by Roland Maichle Planwerk in the small German city of Tübingen in Baden-Württemberg. Located a few dozen kilometres south-west of Stuttgart, it is a historic town and since 1477 home to one of Europe’s oldest universities, which each year welcomes thousands of students.
The new office building, located along Eisenbahnstraße in a prime position next to the railway line, is part of one of Tübingen’s most important redevelopment projects involving the regeneration of a former railway freight yard. Abandoned after freight activities were transferred to the nearby Reutlingen interchange, the area is now at the centre of the Alter Güterbahnhof development project aimed at transforming the disused 15-hectare site into a new mixed-use urban area. The section to the south of the tracks leading to the Hauptbahnhof and the river Neckar will be home to residential, tertiary and commercial buildings for use by the city and the university, while Alter Güterbahnhof will also expand outside this area with the construction of a nearby solar farm serving the new neighbourhood.
Renovation, regeneration and sustainability also serve as the strategic framework for the new Bürogebäude Güterbahnhof, built by a real estate development company based in nearby Gomaringen and completed in 2021. Standing on a corner plot, it has an L-shaped layout with four above-ground storeys as well as a basement level for car and bicycle parking with charging stations for electric vehicles. The focal point for internal distribution is the corner of the building, where the full-height main entrance leads to an open staircase illuminated by a skylight opening onto the flat roof.
The internal organisation reflects the intended use of the complex. It is designed to be highly flexible and to maximise the quantity of natural light entering the working spaces. The offices positioned around its perimeter are used as the headquarters of companies and businesses and are accessible via corridors dominated by neutral white tones and served by utilities concealed in the raised floors and suspended ceilings. The energy-efficient envelope is defined by the uniform dark grey of the outer curtain wall panels, broken up by the regular sequence of large windows shaded by Venetian blind systems.
Right from the design stage, the architects devoted great attention to the choice of materials as one of the cornerstones of healthy and sustainable building. Italian porcelain tiles from Ceramiche Coem’s Pietra Jura collection were chosen for the floors in the common areas. In particular, various elements in the Modulo format are used to brighten up the interiors with their warm textures and varied shading, the 40×60 cm, 20×60 cm and 10×60 cm sizes coordinating to create a delicately beige coloured surface reminiscent of the fine-grained limestone traditionally quarried in the nearby Jura region.