After the First World War, two shoemaker sons – Adolf and Rudolf Dassler – began producing canvas sneakers with spikes here. After the brothers' falling out, this led to the Adidas and Puma corporations, both still headquartered in Herzogenaurach. Adidas, the larger company, has 57,000 employees worldwide, while Puma has 12,000.
Facade: Grid geometries dependent on the sun's position
The defining element of the fully glazed, thermal shell is the fixed, external sun protection grid, composed of large, horizontal diamonds, which extends around the entire building in a closed loop. To simultaneously optimize shading and daylight control, the architects, together with the Austrian specialist Bartenbach Lighting Design, developed a custom system with different grid geometries that take into account different positions of the sun depending on the season and time of day. They were optimized using thermal-dynamic building simulations, the results of which were verified on-site in 2015 using a model of the southwest façade.