Synergy in Action

Traditionally a commercial park hosts a grid of boxy, faceless buildings, and after 5 pm, it’s a stagnant silo in an often suburban or rural landscape, only accessible by car. The 21st century has seen some novel approaches to this typology; companies such as Apple or Vitra have supercharged their facilities into social, cultural, and even public campuses where restaurants, auditoriums, sports, and public art enhance pride and quality of life for not only employees, yet extend a ripple effect on local networks and communities. Taking this a step further, LAVA suggests that within the evolution of the industrial park, the environment could be a benefactor, too.

When Lühnbau, a construction company with a 300-year heritage, outgrew its inner-city location and decided to move to the countryside, it chose to acquire 14 acres of land instead of just building new premises for its headquarters and workshop. Located just outside Lingen, a small town in Lower Saxony, northwest Germany, near the Dutch border, Synergy Park Lühn evolved into a plan to create “a healthier, greener, and more creative work environment for hybrid lifestyles where work and leisure seamlessly merge," explains Associate LAVA Partner Christian Tschersich. The goal was to create a space that, alongside its high-quality office facilities comparable to those found in urban areas, would attract talented employees and like-minded businesses, capitalizing on the rural exodus accelerated by the pandemic.

LAVA listened and responded with a master plan of varied workplace typologies, woven with leisure and landscape, not only encompassing the Lühnbau concrete company’s headquarters but also a high-tech R&D campus with over 10,000 workspaces and a public-facing destination for the surrounding community that’s open 24/7. The site has an urban quality, featuring areas for food cultivation, yoga decks, volleyball, soccer fields, running tracks, and seamless connections to local transport networks, including a bus stop made of Lühnbau’s 3D-printed concrete prototype and existing public pathways.

Sustainability is tackled on multiple levels. The nucleus of the master plan is carbon negative, thanks to the design of the net-zero workshop building, clad in photovoltaics with efficient underground heat pumps. Meanwhile, the flexibility of the park, which foresees and accommodates unpredictable future uses, will extend its life cycle far beyond this generation: “The architecture must be able to adapt to changes in the user’s profile or needs,” says Tschersich. This wide-reaching approach to sustainability results in a campus development that transforms the perception of a traditional industrial park into a model for the future.

Tschersich believes that the rise of hybrid buildings and spaces is in tune with the shift of our society from a hierarchical to a networked structure, informed by technology, customization, and environmental awareness. “We’re stepping into a time deeply connected with nature, an era focused on health and sustainability, anchored in values of honesty and inclusivity, responding to resource scarcity and climate change. Hybrid architecture acknowledges our interconnectedness as individuals and with nature's processes. While we’ll continue harvesting and producing from nature, we must reconsider our methods and the environmental impact of our production facilities.”