C.F. Møller Builds a Hybrid Timber Office in Munich's Former Industrial Quarter

Munich's Werksviertel district has spent the last two decades shedding its industrial skin. What was once the Pfanni potato factory, and later the legendary Kunstpark Ost nightlife complex, is now a dense urban quarter of housing, culture, and business opposite the Ostbahnhof. Into this charged territory, C.F. Møller has placed i8, a six-story office building that reads as both a gateway marker and a serious proposition about how timber construction can scale to commercial architecture.

What makes this project worth attention is the structural ambition behind its gentle facade. The building uses beech laminated veneer lumber paired with concrete composite decks, a hybrid system that substantially cuts embodied carbon while delivering the clear spans and three-meter ceiling heights that speculative office tenants demand. The recycled aluminum cladding, tinted a muted green, gives the exterior an industrial cast that nods to the site's heritage without resorting to pastiche. And the interior, organized around a generous skylit atrium, treats timber not as decorative cladding but as the visible skeleton of a workspace designed around daylight and social connection.

A Facade That Works Twice

The building's street presence relies on a distinctive diagonal bracing pattern visible through the glass curtain wall. These are not decorative appliqués; they are part of the hybrid timber and concrete structural system, expressed honestly on the exterior. The recycled aluminum framing, finished in a soft green that shifts tone under Munich's overcast skies, adds depth without heaviness. Vertical fins modulate the facade rhythm and reference the industrial vernacular of the surrounding Werksviertel blocks.

From a distance, the layered assembly of glass, structure, and metal screening gives the building a kind of visual density that most curtain-wall offices lack. You see through it, but not all at once. The diagonal members catch light differently at each floor, creating a subtle animation across the elevation that rewards a second look.

Timber Structure as Interior Architecture

Inside, the beech laminated veneer lumber is left exposed wherever possible, and its warm honey tone does more for the workplace atmosphere than any amount of biophilic wallpaper could. The ceiling beams in the open office floors run parallel to integrated linear lighting, creating a regular rhythm that is both structurally legible and acoustically functional. Looking up through the atrium, gridded translucent panels flood the space with diffused light while the timber framework recedes into a lattice of overlapping grain lines.

C.F. Møller's decision to use beech rather than the more common spruce or pine is worth noting. Beech has a tighter grain and higher structural capacity, which allows for slimmer members at commercial spans. It also has a distinctly different color and texture from softwood glulam, lending the interiors a material specificity that avoids the generic 'wood box' aesthetic now ubiquitous in Scandinavian and Central European office design.

The Atrium as Social Infrastructure

The central atrium is the project's organizational and experiential core. All six levels open onto it through timber-lined balconies and loggias, making visual contact between floors effortless. A planted tree anchors the polished concrete ground floor, and the large wooden staircase that stitches the levels together is designed as a destination rather than a fire escape. People linger on it, which is the whole point.

The strategy here is deliberate: by making the staircase more inviting than the elevator, C.F. Møller encourages incidental encounters between tenants on different floors. Circular seating overlooks the void, meeting rooms open toward it, and the ground-level lobby functions as an active threshold between the building and the Werksviertel street life outside. It is co-working infrastructure without the branding.

Ground Floor and Urban Activation

The building's L-shaped plan creates a courtyard open to August-Everding-Straße, framing a small public plaza with timber benches and mature trees. This ground-level porosity is essential to the Werksviertel's urban strategy, which depends on activated edges rather than blank podiums. A glass skybridge connects the two wings at upper levels, leaving the courtyard entry generous and permeable at grade.

The restaurant space at ground level, with its curved pink bar stools and floor-to-ceiling windows, brings evening life to a building type that typically goes dark after six o'clock. It is a small move but a meaningful one in a district still building its identity as a place people choose to be, not just commute to.

Flexible Floors and Daylight Strategy

Office floors are designed with optimized depths and three-meter clear ceiling heights to pull daylight as deep into the plan as possible. The floor plates can be subdivided into individual offices, open-plan layouts, or hybrid combinations, a flexibility that reflects the commercial reality of multi-tenant buildings where lease terms shift and team sizes change. Corner meeting rooms frame views through full-height glazing while the timber beams above maintain material continuity.

The kitchenette spaces, finished with patterned tile and open shelving, suggest that C.F. Møller paid real attention to the spaces where people actually spend time between meetings. These are not afterthought pantries. They are proportioned and detailed with the same care as the conference rooms, which says something about how the architects understand contemporary work.

Rooftop and Exterior Thresholds

The rooftop terrace is planted with grasses and perennials in raised beds, offering tenants outdoor space with long views across the Werksviertel. Balconies at intermediate levels provide smaller moments of outdoor access, overlooking the tree-lined courtyard below. These thresholds between inside and out reinforce the building's ambition to be more than a sealed office container: they offer choices about where and how to work throughout the day.

Facade Detail and Material Craft

Up close, the recycled aluminum panels reveal perforated patterns and a surface texture that catches raking light. The diagonal bracing, painted in a slightly warmer tone, reads as a separate layer from the horizontal floor slabs, giving the facade its distinctive depth. Timber planters in the interior courtyard corridors soften the structural expression and introduce greenery at every level, blurring the line between the building's public and working zones.

Plans and Drawings

The drawings reveal the building's angular footprint and the way the L-shaped plan wraps around its courtyard to define a clear public threshold on the southeast corner of the iCampus. Sections through the atrium show how the skylight system and stepped balconies direct daylight deep into the plan while the below-grade parking levels descend in sloped plates beneath the courtyard. The axonometric massing studies trace a logical progression from a simple volume to the final articulated form, with cantilevered floor plates and a sawtooth roof profile that breaks down the building's scale to match its Werksviertel neighbors.

The facade detail drawing is particularly instructive: it isolates the gridded panel system with its diagonal bracing and horizontal floor slabs as a single repeatable unit, demonstrating how the building's visual identity emerges from structural logic rather than applied ornament. The elevations confirm the consistency of the green-toned cladding and vertical fin system across all orientations, with deciduous street trees calibrated to screen the lower floors in summer while allowing solar gain in winter.

Why This Project Matters

Hybrid timber construction in commercial office buildings is no longer experimental, but it remains uncommon at 20,000 square meters. i8 demonstrates that beech laminated veneer lumber paired with concrete composite decks can deliver the structural performance, fire safety, and spatial flexibility that institutional tenants expect, while significantly reducing the embodied carbon of a conventional steel and concrete frame. The building's pursuit of LEED Platinum and DGNB certification gives that claim measurable teeth.

More broadly, i8 offers a model for how a speculative office building can contribute to district-making. Its active ground floor, courtyard plaza, and materially rich facade engage the Werksviertel as a participant rather than a backdrop. In a city where commercial development often defaults to sealed glass volumes, C.F. Møller has produced a building that is structurally honest, environmentally accountable, and genuinely pleasant to be inside. That combination remains rarer than it should be.

i8, iCampus in Werksviertel by C.F. Møller. Munich, Germany. 20,000 m². Completed 2025. Photography by Yohan Zerdoun.

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