Seventh International Congress on Construction History, Lisbon 12 - 16 July 2021

Rouven Grom

The Integrated Façade System by Josef Gartner

Abstract

The company Josef Gartner GmbH in Gundelfingen an der Donau, founded as a small metal workshop in 1868, developed into the leading expert for metal façade constructions in Germany after 1945. Up until the post-war years, Gartner mainly manufactured gates for industrial plants. Additionally, starting in 1946, coupled windows in aluminum were produced. The construction of the first aluminum curtain wall by Gartner followed a few years later and became the main field of activity of the family-owned business in the post-war boom years. Based on numerous technological advances, Gartner grew to become a renowned façade specialist on an international scale. Façades by Gartner cover a hardly manageable number of engineering and architectural icons, like the SAS Hotel in Copenhagen, the Lloyd’s Building in London, the Hypo Tower in Munich, the Bank of China Tower in Hong Kong, as well as the current company headquarters of Apple and UBER. The so-called integrated façade marked a constructional breakthrough, which secured Gartner’s technological leadership in the years since 1970. Karl Gartner, member of the 3rd generation within the family business, had worked, among other things, in the department for the construction of central heating and water supply systems. Building upon his basic observation that water-carrying pipes are non-combustible, Gartner in 1968 patented an “external building wall with water-filled hollow steel columns”. This was the birth of the integrated façade system, which besides fire safety allowed for heating and cooling. The new system was first presented in a pavilion prototype at the international trade fair “BAU 68” in Munich in 1968. After relocation, the pavilion today serves as gatehouse to the plant in Gundelfingen. The pavilion prototype’s steel structure is connected to the hot water heating system, which offered effective cooling in summer and heating in winter and ensures fire prevention without coating the delicate metal structure. The integrated façade is therefore more than a skin separating inside and outside. As a collective system, the façade became an active element that tempers and regulates the building climate. The system has since been used and further developed in many other projects, including for example the BMW Welt in Munich by architects Coop Himmelb(l)au, which was completed in 2007. Step by step, the company opened up international markets on a large scale since the 1970s. But all of it started in the small village in Bavaria, with a rather common observation of water pipes.