The State Office for Finance is a central state authority with various departments that handle financial administration tasks such as processing salaries, benefits, and travel expense reports for civil servants, employees, and pensioners of the Free State of Bavaria. As straightforward as this sounds, the spatial program for the planned new building was equally demanding: far removed from modern "open-plan" concepts, the building was to consist exclusively of individual offices, each used by two employees, sometimes for decades. All these offices are the same size (24 m²), follow the same room typology, and thus perfectly reflect the operational structure of the State Office with its established workflows. However, the design by Wulf Architects demonstrates that the task could be solved in a visually appealing way. They chose an atrium building type with a reinforced concrete frame, with the inner courtyard as the central focal point, around which the foyer, a spacious staircase, the cafeteria, and the inner ring of offices are oriented. On the upper floors of the five-storey building, all office spaces are arranged in a ring and accessed via a central corridor. This corridor receives natural light through the skylights of the adjacent offices and is enhanced by the warm surfaces of the wooden partitions and the seemingly transparent expanded metal ceiling.
The architects pleasantly softened the building's otherwise consistent volume with a few small but skillful interventions: a recessed entrance area with the transparent foyer behind it creates a transition to the urban space and a connection to the inner courtyard. While the courtyard is only accessible to employees, it is visible to passersby. A generous single-flight staircase adds further spaciousness and openness to this area. On the top floor, roof terraces facing south and towards the old town lend lightness to the otherwise compact structure. The design of the facades facing the city creates a dynamic, vertically emphasized relief, characterized by its plasticity and the interplay of glass and aluminium. The increasingly intense colour tint of the aluminium surfaces towards the top adds further dynamism. In contrast, the facade facing the inner courtyard features a distinctly calm, horizontal structure.
The building not only seeks a connection to its surroundings architecturally, but is also harmoniously integrated into the urban fabric. Its recessed position on the site creates a central, pedestrian-only plaza facing the old town, serving as a meeting point and distribution point for all the adjacent entrances to the other government buildings. Uniform granite paving and a canopy of clipped plane trees unify the new buildings and the existing historical structures into a cohesive quarter. A brightly coloured field of stelae by the artist Tom Kristen adds striking accents.
