Autostadt
The Autostadt Wolfsburg, next to the world's largest automotive plant, forms its own district with large buildings and pavilions, waterways and bridges, lakes and headlands, hills and green spaces. The Volkswagen Group's openness to the customer is conveyed by the high level of transparency in the architecture.
Das Auto in all its facets
With the realisation of this automotive world of experience, Volkswagen AG has created a new service and communication platform. The symbol of the Autostadt are the 48-metre-high Car Towers, in which the vehicles are placed ready for delivery to the customers. As an interface to the plant, they complement the ensemble of pavilions for the Audi, Seat, Skoda, Bentley, Lamborghini, Volkswagen and Volkswagen Commercial Vehicles brands, as well as the CustomerCenter and the GroupForum, the AutoMuseum and The Ritz-Carlton hotel.
"The Autostadt welcomes its customers as visitors, and guides them through the mobility topics of tomorrow."
- Gunter Henn, HENN
A GroupForum for visions of the future
The entrance to the Autostadt is formed by a pedestrian bridge that connects the city of Wolfsburg with the Autostadt as an extension of the historic city axis over the Mittelland Canal. It ends directly in front of the gates to the GroupForum.
The doors are curved like airplane wings and are usually open. This open column architecture can be seen as a modern translation of historic hall designs that date back to antiquity. To close the hall, the glass doors are turned in like curtain slats.
Between the glass columns, the piazza is a high, empty space. The urban elements of the Autostadt are repeated in this bright space, which resembles an orangery. The hall as a supporting structure contains the event: mysterious, colourful cubes, restaurants, cinemas and their film attractions. While the event changes and renews itself over time, the hall remains constant in its structure and in this way is representative of the Volkswagen Group.
A new car every 40 seconds
The northern boundary of the Autostadt is formed by a long, rectangular water basin with two glass cylinders in the north-east: the Car Towers. They symbolise the vehicle production process and are used to store the brand-new cars before delivery. Each of the towers holds 400 vehicles, which are transported by elevators to the free shafts of the 20 storeys.
Every 40 seconds, a new car enters the cylinder underground directly from the plant, while another leaves the tower for the CustomerCenter. This constant movement inside the cylinders provides the heartbeat of the Autostadt as a glass engine.
Analogue meets digital in the ZeitHaus
The ZeitHaus consists of two basic elements that embody the opposing pair of the analogue and the digital. A 5-storey glass rack houses a collection of automobiles like miniatures in a set box. It embodies the chronological and the rational, i.e. digital memory: recollection.
The curved, bow-shaped body of the ZeitHaus displays the automobile in its social and cultural context in the form of a Memory Lane. It thus stands for the associative and the emotional, i.e. analogue memory: orientation.
The rack is rectangular and transparent, while the body is cubic, windowless and mysterious. Between the two parts of the building, bridges and stairs form connections like neuronal pathways between the right and left sides of the brain.
