ThyssenKrupp Magazin

40 CAB DESIGN
If the side walls are made from stainless steel, one has arrived in
the modernity of elevator construction. For in earlier times, elevators
were usually made from wood – a material that today is used almost
nowhere but in Spain and occasionally in North America. Safety factors
usually speak against the use of these mobile wooden rooms, however:
elevators are supposed to contain as little flammable material as
possible. Not least for this reason, seven of every 10 elevators made by
ThyssenKrupp are fitted with high-quality, corrosion-resistant stainless
steel.
Stainless steel offers another advantage: the elevators of
ThyssenKrupp Elevator are built for the middle- to upper market segments,
and these customers want the cabs to reflect this exclusivity.
“Although stainless steel isn’t exactly warm and cozy, it is elegant and
of a high quality,” says Bernd Scherzinger, head of the sales center in
Neuhausen near Stuttgart. In addition, the material has a long lifecycle
and is more low-maintenance than the formerly popular metal sheets
or formica plates widely used in the 1970s.
Designers’ latest fashion fads are the “Korn 200” stainless steel,
which is brushed and polished with a velvety shine, as well as stainless
steel with a linen pattern, where even greasy fingers leave hardly a
trace. Stainless steel can also be ordered with diamond patterns or a
leather structure.
Customers more concerned about prestige than about cleaning
can order the exclusive, highly polished stainless steel and, if desired,
decorate it with etched patterns. These rather grandiose stainless
steels tend to be most popular in Asia. In Western countries, a large
mirror wall will often be installed in the elevator wall facing the door, to
make it easier for wheelchair users to reverse out of the elevator.
Insight into the past and the present
Customers from Arab countries, in particular, like their cabs to
shine not only through stainless steel: in these countries, the sheets
often twinkle in copper, brass or gold. “Countries like Germany usually
have no golden elevators,” says Bernd Scherzinger. “That would be
considered too sumptuous here.”
ThyssenKrupp is regarded as the world's major producer of stainless
steel, but, fortunately, that business does not depend primarily on
elevator construction, where “we work with pharmaceutical doses,” explains
Rembert Horstmann. “What you see when you look at an elevator
gives the impression that it consists only of stainless steel,” but in
fact ThyssenKrupp can produce the annual stainless steel demand of
the worldwide elevator sector in about two weeks, he points out.
THE FUTURE THRIVES ON TRANSPARENCY
Other trends are emerging with regard to cab design. Transparency has
been a fashion in elevator construction for the past few years, with one
in five elevators built by ThyssenKrupp now consisting of glass. “That
calls for totally different optical standards with regard to the shaft structure,”
explains Scherzinger. For in the case of “normal” elevators, what
the passenger does not see does not have to be beautiful, but merely
practical, which is why the back of the cabin sheets, for example, is covered
in insulation material, shafts consist of unadorned concrete, and
steel sheets emerge behind just a few millimeters of stainless steel.
In addition, all cabs are equipped with control systems that preclude
crash scenarios known from Hollywood movies – which, incidentally,
are purely fictional, because elevators have been crash-safe
since 1853. Glass elevators also boast all normal safety elements, but
these are kept as invisible as possible – which, of course, costs a lot