advanced building skins 14 | 15 June 2012 - lamp.tugraz.at - Graz ...

Prof. Dr.nat.techn. Oliver Englhardt
Institute of Building Construction
Graz University of Technology
Copyright © with the authors. All rights reserved.
Summary
The Enzo Ferrari Museum, Modena
Engineering a Freeform Skin
Lucio Blandini, Dr.-Ing.
Timo Schmidt, Dr. sc. hum. Dipl.-Ing.
Thomas Winterstetter, Dr.-Ing. Dipl.-Wirt.-Ing.
Werner Sobek, Prof. Dr. Dr. E. h.
Werner Sobek Stuttgart, Germany. www.wernersobek.com
The exhibition gallery of the Enzo Ferrari Museum in Modena has been designed by Future Systems
London referring to iconic free form elements of the sport car design. The gallery façade is
composed of a curved glass envelope facing Enzo Ferrari’s birth house as well as of a free-form
yellow aluminum roof. This paper focuses on the customized solutions developed to engineer both
the glass and the aluminum façade.
Keywords: Free Form, Cable-stayed facade, Aluminum roof
1 Introduction
The recently opened Museum dedicated to Enzo Ferrari in Modena plays with the duality between the
renovated historical building where Ferrari was born in 1898 and a futuristic exhibition gallery designed
by Jan Kaplicky (Future Systems, London), shortly before his death. The gallery embraces the
masonry building and relates to it, whereas its sculptural form is clearly inspired by sport car design.
However, while in the car industry complex geometries are realized by moulding presses to produce
numerous identical elements, in architecture the specificity of each work, the difference in scale and
costs requires a different approach to deal with such forms. The philosophy chosen in engineering the
façade for the Enzo Ferrari Museum in Modena was to maintain a relative simple geometry for the facade
panels which have to be assembled and to adapt to the different geometrical situations by means
of complex customized detailing.
Figure 1: Enzo Ferrari Museum (Werner Sobek Stuttgart)
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