Covestro Headquarters / HENN

Text description provided by the architects. The new Covestro Headquarters reflects the company’s ethos of radical experimentation and innovation. A high-tech polymer company, Covestro creates materials used in every aspect of modern life, from green energy to healthcare to electronics to its own building interior. HENN’s design functions as an accelerator: a space to inspire and support the future-oriented solutions of the company as it addresses issues of sustainability and moves towards a circular economy.

The six-story Covestro Headquarters, completed in November of 2020, is a bold announcement of the company’s presence along the B8 motorway. Its sleek form is the result of highly efficient modular construction—a single Z-shaped unit is stacked and mirrored to create a series of recessed garden terraces on the building’s facade.

The same formal logic shapes the HQ’s rich interior life. The building’s angled exterior and central atrium create an extroverted “pinch point” at the heart of the building. The atrium’s cascading stairways and terraced spaces act as an informal town hall for events and gatherings, while open-office seating, flexible work areas, and private rooms are organized along a gradient from communal around the atrium to solitary at the periphery.

Innovation requires a combination of highly functional technical spaces and informal social spaces. Designed as a space of encounter, The new Covestro Headquarters maximizes the visual and physical connections between spaces, departments, and people—engineering the serendipitous meetings that lead to unexpected and innovative solutions.

The headquarters is part of the HENN-designed Covestro Campus, which will be completed in 20xx. The campus will link research, development, and administration into a single coherent entity and will include a hybrid office-laboratory building and a technical center/pilot plant, alongside the new headquarters.