HPP have won the Europe-wide competition with their concept for the new Visitor Centre as a central point of contact for employees, visiting researchers and the public. Generous rooms for meetings, training, work and recreation are arranged on six levels across a gross floor area of 5,200 m². "The architecture of the winning design by HPP Architects shows many references to DESY's home city of Hamburg, and the embedding of the building in the local environment has been an outstanding success," said Helmut Dosch, Chairman of the DESY Board of Directors. The outer façade of the building, with its vertical golden-yellow lamellas, is inspired by a drift chamber, a highly sensitive detection device with 30,000 ultra-fine wires for recording particle traces, which used to be used at DESY. The façade of the cube-shaped building also features the orbits of classical electron accelerators. "It was important for us to translate motifs from DESY research into architecture, both visually and functionally," says HPP Associate Partner Matthias Latzke, describing the design concept.
