Baumeister nach8 at Meixner Schlüter Wendt

Is brick contemporary? That was the topic of Baumeister nach8 on August 23 in Frankfurt am Main. The event took place on the premises of Meixner Schlüter Wendt, an office that stands for innovative architecture, but at the same time does not have the reputation of being particularly fond of bricks.

In addition to the two office partners Claudia Meixner and Florian Schlüter, Clemens Kuhlemann, Managing Director of Deutsche Poroton GmbH, also took part in the discussion. The event was moderated by Baumeister editor Alexander Russ. Clemens Kuhlemann also represented the Lebensraum Ziegel information platform, which is backed by the Unipor, Thermopor, Poroton and Mein Ziegelhaus product groups. He represented the industry side, while Claudia Meixner and Florian Schlüter shed light on building with bricks from an architect’s perspective.

The evening began with an introduction by Claudia Meixner and Florian Schlüter, who first presented innovative brick buildings by other architectural firms in order to demonstrate the design potential of the material for modern construction. These included the design for the Chelsea FC stadium in London by Herzog & de Meuron and the European Hanseatic Museum in Lübeck by Studio Andreas Heller. The two architects then explained their working methods based on their own projects. These included the Schmuck residential building, for which Meixner Schlüter Wendt converted a single-storey building from the 1950s into a spacious residential building. This building subsequently served as the basis for a discussion on the structural properties of brick. This included the question of the service life of the construction, which was discussed with the help of a comparison of the thermal insulation composite system used for the Schmuck residential building with the structural properties of a monolithic brick wall.

While Clemens Kuhlemann emphasized the recyclability and durability of brick, Claudia Meixner and Florian Schlüter raised the question of whether a brick filled with insulation is actually a real brick, which was the subject of lively debate and subsequently triggered a discussion about the structural properties of the material. As an example of its structural potential, Clemens Kuhlemann referred to a ten-storey residential building in Regensburg, whose load-bearing walls consist of monolithic brick walls. All three panelists agreed on the advantages of monolithic brick walls over multi-layered wall structures in terms of ease of construction. As an example, Clemens Kuhlemann cited the complex solutions that are necessary when placing windows flush with the façade in a multi-layered wall. In contrast, when drawing a monolithic brick wall, only four lines are needed – for the external render, the brick itself and for the internal render. Finally, the design possibilities of the exposed brick were also discussed at length, making it clear that the brick is not only a material of the future from a structural point of view.