[Translate to Englisch:] Neue Messe Karlsruhe

Karlsruhe (DE)

New Karlsruhe Exhibition Centre

Around the year 2000, the city of Karlsruhe decided to build a new exhibition centre. Gerber Architekten planned 4 halls, each with a free span of 80 metres and a length of 160 metres. The invitation to tender went out to steel construction as well as timber construction companies. And WIEHAG won the contract for the timber construction industry.

At that time, it was one of the largest ever project orders for the timber construction industry. With its in-house engineering ideas, WIEHAG can prevail over steel construction, as well as all its leading competitors in timber construction.

Project description

Maximum spans achieved in timber

All halls are spanned over their entire width of 80 m each without supports by a curved timber roof construction with intermittent waist-shaped light joints in the transverse direction. Some 6,500 m³ of glued laminated timber will be used for the entire hall area of around 55,000 m². The individual components have a width of up to 54 cm, a height of up to 110 cm and a curved length of approx. 42 m.

Three of the four halls have a smooth roof soffit designed with 3-layer solid timber boards. The multifunctional hall, on the other hand, is defined by a stronger load-bearing, rhombic timber structure with continuous, superimposed girders.

Use of timber, a renewable resource, enabled total emission savings of approx. 23,000 tonnes of CO2. The project was awarded the Energy Globe 2005 for this achievement.