Dresden Library Wins German Stone Award

NUREMBURG, Germany — The new building at the Saxon State Library in Dresden, Germany, is the winning entry for the German Natural Stone Award 2003 given in conjunction with the Stone+tec trade event held here next month.
The award went to the Berlin firm of Ortner & Ortner — or, more specifically, architects Laurids and Manfred Ortner — for creating a building that meets the requirements of contemporary architecture and architectural culture, according to the findings of the award jury.
The 4,700 m²/50,590f ft² of the library facade is clad in Thuringian travertine, with slabs 6cm/2.3” thick and 122 X 90cm/48” X 35.4” in area. The construction uses supporting and restraining anchors with rear ventilation.
To obtain joints as small as possible — i.e. 5mm-8mm/.2”-.3” — to give the building a monolithic appearance, semicircular anchor pockets are countersunk around the holes for the anchor spikes. Joints are filled with permanently elastic filler and sanded off with a mixture of quartz sand and stone dust.
Flutings of 4cm/1.5” and 16cm/6.2” wide and 2cm/.78” deep are cut in the surface of the slabs using a diamond-cutting machine, and then roughly ground by hand (C 60 grain). These grooves are arranged in six different grids to create a moving appearance.
Lauster Steinbau of Stuttgart installed the stone, which came from TRACO GmbH of Bad Langensalza.
The jury for the German Natural Stone Award 2003 met under the chairmanship of Dipl.-Ing. Kaspar Kraemer, President of the Bund Deutscher Architekten (BDA), in the Exhibition Centre Nuremberg at the end of January 2003. The expert jury members included Volker Staab, who had received the German Natural Stone Award for the New Museum for Art and Design in Nuremberg at Stone+tec 2001; the panel judged a record number of 88 entries on the theme of “indoor and outdoor spaces of natural stone”.
The German Natural Stone Award is presented every two years by the Deutscher Naturwerkstein-Verband (DNV) in co-operation with the Bund Deutscher Architekten (BDA) and is promoted by NürnbergMesse, the organizer of Stone+tec.
Stone+tec 2003 will be held May 29-June 1.