Title: BMW Technical Training Center
Location of Proejct: Spartanburg, SC
Project Completion Date: N/A
Firm Name: BLDGS

Short Description: This new 127,000 GSF Technical Training Center building at BMW’s existing Plant 10 manufacturing campus in Spartanburg, SC, was developed as part a comprehensive master plan to expand BMW’s training facilities while creating a new “front door experience” that provides “a local, South Carolina feel for a German building” and a “place of cultural exchange” not just through a building, but through the larger relationship of buildings and landscape.

Architect's Statement: Site
The East Campus of BMW’s Plant 10 in Spartanburg, SC, which produces X-Series SUVs, is a densely wooded forest (former peach orchards) – surrounded by highways and a 10 million sf production plant (West Campus). Partially developed, Plant 10’s East Campus contains an existing Administrative Headquarters and a small Campus Training building - each isolated from the other by vast surface parking lots with suburban parking-to-building relationships.

Proposal
The proposed 127,000 GSF Technical Training Center was developed as part an ambitious proposition from BMW to create a fundamentally new front door experience with “a local, South Carolina feel for a German building” and as a “place of authentic cultural exchange.” Our proposal was to do this not only through a new building, but through carefully constructed relationships between buildings and landscape.

The primary element that organizes new parking, the existing Campus Training Center and two new buildings (the Technical Training Center and a shared Canteen), is a large landscaped courtyard space we named the “XHOF” – a courtyard scaled to support public receptions, community events, and gatherings for the full 11,000 employees of the facility. As the new ‘front door experience’, this space becomes a cross-road between the existing Campus Training Center and the new Technical Training Center, intended to help mix employees using both training centers with those from the nearby Headquarters Building (Site Operations Center).

Within this newly defined site, the new Technical Training Center building is internally separated into several different types of training labs – but the primary experience entering into the lobby is of a large, collaborative, light-filled factory setting – with glass walls providing views through the secure program areas, to create a context for “learning instead of training.” To minimize its carbon footprint – the building is structured with an mass-timber frame and cross-laminated timber panels; naturally daylit; and clad in lightweight recycled perforated aluminum panels. Primary conditioning systems include radiant heating and cooling, and natural ventilation. The bay-spacing is highly flexible, conforming to global BMW standards for space planning and future expansion.

1. SITE: BMW requested the design establish a new “front door experience” to their entire campus and provide “a local, South Carolina feel for a German building,” in order to establish “a place of cultural exchange.” In needed to be both iconic and functional, and to create an emotional reaction that could serve as a recruiting tool, solidifying BMW as an attractive employer.

The brief also required that the “landscape be considered as a critical, unifying element larger than all the buildings” and that it “accommodate various events, presentations and special events internal and external.”

The project had to incorporate the existing, isolated buildings, and establish a “cohesive campus environment” that was distinctive and meaningful. It should provide “a concept for the (site and) building related to BMW’s brand.”

DESIGN RESPONSE: The proposed “XHOF” is the central unifying element of the master plan and site, designed to simultaneously address the brief’s requests for campus unity, front door experience, integrated landscape, and event spaces as part of a ‘brand experience.’ The XHOF combines the X-Series produced in Plant-10 with the German “hof”, or courtyard, as the basis of this entry condition.

The XHOF is scaled to create a unifying experience and is capable of supporting major gatherings, but also includes diverse areas of shade trees, seating, and water for daily-use gathering areas. The space is bounded by a perimeter wall of monumental quality. But it is also unexpectedly ephemeral and porous, allowing light into the adjacent buildings while blocking the intense SW sun. This screen-wall identifies with BMW’s signature vertical white metal fin panels, and creates an entry porch between the screen and each of the surrounding buildings.

2. BUILDING: The brief required a highly sustainable building representative of BMW’s approach to environmental responsibility. The building(s) should be “economically and environmentally structured but innovative and provide tremendously flexible use of space.”

While primarily a training facility and factory-like setting, the interiors were to be “warm and welcoming, encourage casual collisions of people and provide physical and visual connectivity between floors and with other buildings on site.”

DESIGN RESPONSE: While oriented to BMW’s existing development grid, the Technical Training Center adapts each architectural feature (entry porch, skylights, screened south-facing windows, upper level exterior terrace) to the local sun and climate conditions to create a simple but complex range of interior environments.

This range creates a power and memorable experience through a considered sequence of spaces - and with a simple palette of lustrous opaque and perforated metal panels on the exterior, contrasting with the warm wood exposed structure of the interior, the building creates large, inviting, natural light, volumes of interior space that resonate with their global and local contexts.