HEADS Campus – Aschheim

This 42,000 m² complex in Aschheim, on the edge of Munich, was once the headquarters of Wirecard. Its rebirth as the HEADS Campus turns a monument to corporate rigour into a multi-tenant workplace, and Ippolito Fleitz Group’s brief was placemaking: to give the austere orthogonal architecture an identity that makes lobbies, atriums and courtyards feel like places to stay rather than pass through.

The move that organises everything is treating the building’s four voids as four characters. The green neighbourhood is the social heart: a working café with an oxblood bar, a stepped timber platform and a circular water table beneath four storeys of planted balconies. Under the tree is the village square, where two mature fig trees shade a tiered planter bench. The secret garden encloses a circular bench in dense bamboo for open-air meetings, and the floating landscape weaves seating niches through looser, layered greenery. Some 1,200 plants thread the sections together, connecting interior to exterior.

A wayfinding system of coloured discs names each quarter and colour-matches every lift core, so orientation in the deep plan becomes intuitive. Luminous columns mark the routes between. The result reads less like an office building with plants and more like a small town that happens to be indoors.