Cast-stone and concrete floors for German Embassy
The Chancery of the German Embassy in Paris is located in the 8th arrondissement on Avenue Franklin D. Roosevelt, quite central, on the rear side of the Grand Palais and only a few steps from the Champs Élysées. The building, erected as a reinforced concrete skeleton construction, originates from the 1960s and was completely renovated between 2015 and 2019 under the supervision of the German Federal Office for Building and Regional Planning (BBR): according to the BBR, “… with focus on renovation of the above-ground stories as well as replacement of the façade.”
The architectural firm Baumewerd from Münster, Germany, was commissioned for the necessary planning of this project. The founder of the firm, Prof. Dieter Georg Baumewerd, who died in December last year, numbers among the leading representatives of German and international post-war architecture and made a name for himself in particular for the museums and embassies he built.
Brilliantly finished floor as eye catcher
In the course of the general renovation of the German embassy, the old staircase, among others, was completely removed. For the newly designed eight-story staircase, a ceiling breakthrough with new enclosure had to be created to accommodate the elegant white, ground precast stair elements. The stair elements were manufactured in the Zwickau plant of R. Bayer Beton- und Terrazzogruppe from Blaubeuren, Germany. The same applies to the round landings that were installed onto the stairs. These were also manufactured and ground in the precast plant, and their round edges had to be reworked manually. A local French building contractor then picked up the stairs and the landings in Zwickau, where they had been carefully packed in the plant to protect them during transport. This contractor transported and installed them in Paris. Both the precast stairs and the landings were produced based on Dyckerhoff White.
The Dyckerhoff Terraplan floor system was installed on the ground floor. Delivered in a truck mixer of a local TB producer and transported to the construction site, the special concrete flowed first of all smoothly into the specified rooms on the ground floor as well as in the areas in front of the elevators, before being ground and polished several times after hardening. In the future, the thus brilliantly finished floor will be a central eye catcher in the entrance area of the chancery building. With its formula having been adapted to match the precast elements, it brings both materiality and color and, most of all, brightness into the interior of the embassy building. The Terraplan floor was also installed by the cast stone plant R. Bayer Betonsteinwerk from Blaubeuren in Germany.
