WORDS Graham Wood PHOTOS Courtesy of Paragon Architects
An award-winning industrial showroom in Joburg shows how, with creativity and design savvy, architecture can transcend functionality.
Drive along the R24 highway near OR Tambo International Airport, and you can’t help but notice it: a huge, bubble-shaped building with a glass front displaying gigantic excavators, bulldozers, graders and the like. Recently recognised by the Gauteng Institute for Architecture with an Award of Excellence, Barloworld Equipment’s headquarters is an exciting architectural flourish in the industrial landscape of Isando – especially when viewed among the relentless functional aesthetics of the other warehouses and factories in the area.
However, as Anthony Orelowitz, director at Paragon Architects (who designed the building) explains, this building is as efficiently engineered and cost-sensitive as any of them. He and his team simply found a way to liberate some extra design value.
What you see from the highway is a showroom with offices at the back, which is part of a larger campus for Barloworld Equipment, the southern African dealer for Caterpillar earthmoving machinery. The complex includes the company head office and a training centre; the eye-catching showroom was a new addition in a broader renovation.
Anthony explains that the distinctive shape of the showroom building was motivated by two things. First was the realisation that one of the most efficient ways to “capture the volume” necessary to house the gigantic vehicles was to create a bubble rather than a box. The poetry came with the savvy insight that the looping shape with a roof that comes right down to the ground is reminiscent of the iconic “caterpillar” tread associated with earthmoving equipment.
And this equipment is huge – the biggest vehicles weigh in at 60 tons. Their wheels alone, Anthony points out, are too big to get through an ordinary garage door. In fact, he says that the double-glazed vertical sliding doors they had to design to get the equipment in and out are the largest in the world, at 8.4m by 5.5m.
By playing with the iconography of the building’s form, in a single design gesture they could achieve the necessary scale to house the machinery and create what Anthony calls “an object as opposed to just a space for these vehicles”. Its position alongside a busy highway was a perfect opportunity for “building as billboard”, he adds.
Seen from a distance, the building and equipment are in proportion, but the sheer scale of the earthmoving machinery – and the space to house it – can be unsettling close up. When you take into account the fact that the building is also an office space, you get a sense of the challenge the architects faced in reconciling the vast volumes with the need for something that has comfortable human dimensions for the people working there.
The showroom has two key areas – a “loop within a loop” as Anthony describes it. There’s a glassed-in showroom, where the offices are also located, and another covered outdoor display area. The building actually curves, so that you don’t take it in all at once. “It reveals itself in a journey, as you travel from one end to the other,” Anthony explains. The curve was a massive challenge for the engineers, especially when combined with a curved roof, but the teams pulled it off, and have rightfully won several awards for their trouble, notably at the Southern African Institute of Steel Construction’s Steel Awards.
Inside, extensive internal landscaping and planting create a soft barrier between the otherwise open and connected showroom space and the offices, which brings down the scale. The planting also “brings the outside in”, so to speak, in a playful inversion of outside and inside that riffs off the notion of having earthmoving equipment indoors in the first place.
This building is a fine example of how, with a little insight, some engineering wizardry and a keen architectural eye, what might have been a bland and functional space is instead a landmark – and a delight.
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