The new Covestro Headquarters reflects the company’s ethos of radical experimentation and innovation. A high-tech polymer company, Covestro creates materials used in every aspect of modern life, from green-energy to healthcare to electronics to its own building interior.
Project Name: Covestro Headquaters
Studio Name: HENN Architekten
Year: 2020
Typology: Office, Headquarters
Client: Covestro Deutschland AG
Area GFA: 23,181 m2
Status: Completed
Location: Leverkusen, Germany
Program: Office, Administration, Idea Lab and Exhibition Space, Meeting Area, Parking Consultants: Bollinger + Grohmann Ingenieure (Structural engineering), m+p gruppe, (MEP), Müller-BBM (Building physics), Bollinger + Grohmann Ingenieure (Facade), Lichtvision Design & Engeneering (Lighting), Kinzo Architekten (Interior), hhpberlin (Fire protection), Rainer Schmidt Landschaftsarchitekten (Landscape architecture)
TEAM
Partner in Charge: Daniel Festag, Marcus Fissan & Christian Bechtle
Design Director: Martin Henn
Team: Team: Lida Alibegovich, Hyejin Cho, Sebastian Gast, Christoph Hildebrandt, Alejandro Konrad, Wolfgang Malisius, Claus Mansbrügge, Raluca Radu, Michael Sadomskyj, Katja Schuppelius, Anja Siebert
HENN’s design functions as an accelerator: a space to inspire and support the future-oriented solutions of the company as it addresses issues of sustainability and moves towards a circular economy.
The six-story Covestro Headquarters, completed in November of 2020, is a bold announcement of the company’s presence along the B8 motorway. Its sleek form is the result of highly efficient modular construction—a single Z-shaped unit is stacked and mirrored to create a series of recessed garden terraces on the building’s facade.
The same formal logic shapes the HQ’s rich interior life. The building’s angled exterior and central atrium create an extroverted “pinch point” at the heart of the building. The atrium’s cascading stairways and terraced spaces act as an informal town hall for events and gatherings, while open-office seating, flexible work areas, and private rooms are organized along a gradient from communal around the atrium to solitary at the periphery.
Innovation requires a combination of highly functional technical spaces and informal social spaces. Designed as a space of encounter, The new Covestro Headquarters maximizes the visual and physical connections between spaces, departments and people—engineering the serendipitous meetings that lead to unexpected and innovative solutions.
The headquarters is part of the HENN-designed Covestro Campus, which will be completed in 2025. The campus will link research, development, and administration into a single coherent entity and will include a hybrid office-laboratory building and a technical center/pilot plant, alongside the new headquarters.