At Merck's head­quar­ters in Darm­stadt, pro­duc­tion, re­search and ad­min­is­tra­tion are con­cen­trated on an area of 1.25 square kilo­me­ters. A road net­work 36 kilo­me­ters long con­nects more than 400 build­ings. 11,000 em­ploy­ees, de­liv­ery traf­fic and vis­i­tors come and go here every day. Our con­cept of the ad­di­tive sys­tem, which was al­ready in­stalled in the In­no­va­tion Cen­ter in 2017, has now been trans­lated into the out­door area.

The new head­quar­ters of Aachen­Münch­ener In­sur­ance cap­ti­vates vis­i­tors through its open ar­chi­tec­ture. A glass bridge con­nects the dif­fer­ent parts of the build­ing and leaves room for a pedes­trian zone and shops. This en­hances the over­all ur­ban at­trac­tive­ness and also serves the par­tic­u­lar de­mands placed upon it by the var­i­ous groups of users, i.e. the clients of Aachen­Münch­ener and its sup­pli­ers. Moni­teurs adopted the ba­sic con­cept of the fa­cade by de­riv­ing the shape, ma­te­r­ial and colour of the ori­en­ta­tion sys­tem columns di­rectly from it: tall rec­tan­gles hold the in­for­ma­tion, but nev­er­the­less al­low a view of the build­ing be­hind. This is com­ple­mented by dis­creet signs placed di­rectly onto the Aachen­Münch­ener build­ing.