European Central Bank

Project
Summary

The European Central Bank in Frankfurt is based on a design from the Viennese architectural office of Coop Himmelb(l)au and essentially consists of 3 parts: the historical Großmarkthalle (market hall) dating back to the year 1928, the two skyscraper towers linked by a giant atrium, and the entrance building, which links the old and new buildings together. Yuanda – as one out of 5 facade suppliers – has been providing design, delivery and installation of the historical windows and skylights of the length sides of Grossmarkthalle.

Key
Facts

• 6 floors

• 150 containers of material

• 150 different windows types

• 12,700m2 of façade

• 2,400m2 of motorised steel windows

Scope

Historical windows, partially motorized

Glass/aluminium awnings

Horizontal steel glass roofs

Pyramid-shaped glass roofs

Smoke vents, doors

Facing
Challenges

The challenge of the renovation of the 220 m-long Großmarkthalle has been a substantial element in the planning and implementation within our facade package.

In the course of this the entire hall, which has been formerly designed by architect Martin Elsaesser dated back to the year 1928, has been completely gutted and renovated to be revealed in completely new splendour, both inside and outside.

We expected all ‘historical windows’ to be of the same size, but after a survey, we discovered a huge number of different dimensions which resulted in us designing and fabricating up to 150 different windows sizes.

Off-site
Prefabrication

Building a facade within an almost 100-year-old structure was a challenge that we had to take. We had to ensure that these many different window sizes always fitted into their right place and within the time slot of the scaffold inside the market hall being in position.

The production had to be flexible enough to allow adjustments at short notice. As our production base is far away in China, we had to manage the risks of production, transportation and logistics in order to ensure the windows and other parts of the facade arrived in time and sequence on site.

The risk of an unexpected extension of the construction period of the overall ECB new premises has been managed by good coordination with the Client and his teams.

Site
Challenges

The Steel Windows were fully assembled at our factory in China, with the final installation on-site in Frankfurt. All parts did arrive in Frankfurt in time and have been stored on site without any delay.

The completion of our scope was in time in order to allow the Client to move their offices to the new ECB premises.