Vivien Bögelsack and Vera Gremme have received this year’s Lions Club Hildesheim prize for outstanding academic work in the conservation and restoration courses at the University of Applied Sciences and Arts For eleven years now, the Lions Club Hildesheim has honored outstanding academic work from the Department of Conservation and Restoration Sciences at the University of Applied Sciences and Arts […].

Vivien Bögelsack and Vera Gremme have been awarded this year’s Lions Club Hildesheim prize for outstanding academic work in the conservation and restoration courses at the Hildesheim University of Applied Sciences and Arts

For the past eleven years, the Lions Club Hildesheim has honored outstanding academic work from the Department of Conservation and Restoration Sciences at the University of Applied Sciences and Arts in Hildesheim. This year, the jury could not decide on a winner. They therefore honored two graduates: Vera Gremme and Vivien Bögelsack. The club actually sees itself as a source of inspiration and primarily provides selective support. However, Marc Rothstein, President of the Lions Club, explained that “in a cultural city like Hildesheim, the courses of study in conservation and restoration as well as architecture and the preservation of historic buildings deserve special attention”.

The two award-winning Master’s theses could not be more different. Vera Gremme was awarded for her thesis on the “Investigation of new products for applicability using the example of adhesive-coated stabilizing papers”, Vivien Bögelsack for the implementation of her Master’s topic “On the role of monument preservation in the European Cultural Heritage Year 2018 (ECHY) – Five essays on multi-layered cultural influences in border regions, on the cultural connectedness of Europe and the creation of a European identity”.

While Vera Gremme’s work impressed the jury as an example of responsible action by conservators and the necessary research and consideration of new products and their long-term effects, Vivien Bögelsack impressed the jury with her “journalistic style”. The jury praised it because the work is written in an easily understandable way and is therefore not only of interest to a specialist audience. On the other hand, it addresses a topic that is topical and important, especially as “the European Year of Cultural Heritage has probably passed most people by far too quietly”, said Lions Club President Rothstein, adding: “We should campaign for the preservation of our cultural heritage at regional, international and European level. This can help to give the European Union social backing.”

Franzisca Rainalter worked as an intern at AllesWirdGut Architektur for six months. Along the way, she visited innovative and special residential buildings in Vienna to present them here. For her last contribution to the Vienna series, she took a look at two participatory projects planned by AllesWirdGut. My time at AllesWirdGut Architektur and therefore also in Vienna is coming to an […]

Franzisca Rainalter worked as an intern at AllesWirdGut Architektur for six months. Along the way, she visited innovative and special residential buildings in Vienna to present them here. For her last contribution to the Vienna series, she took a look at two participatory projects planned by AllesWirdGut.

My time at AllesWirdGut Architektur and therefore also in Vienna is slowly coming to an end. A time full of new experiences and adventures, new impressions and insights. As we all know, the winter months are not the best in Vienna – and yet I have grown very fond of the city.

High time to write a report about an AWG project. So, on an almost spring-like Saturday in February, I made my way to the magdas Hotel. It is located in Gräzl in the 2nd district, right next to the Vienna Prater. The current hotel and former retirement home has been around for a few years. It was built in the 1960s and was given a new function in 2015. The result is Hotel magdas, where people from all over the world come together. It is still difficult for people with a refugee background to find work – many factors make it difficult for refugees to arrive in their new country and find a new home there. The Magmas Hotel aims to make this easier. Skills, talents, languages and cultural backgrounds come together at magdas in the form of a hotel and shared apartments, creating a meeting place. The hotel is home to around 25 young people who fled to Austria without their parents. The hotel is also the workplace for some of these young adults.

AllesWirdGut Architektur designed the meeting place. While the façades remained untouched, the lobby, restaurant and bar, the 78 hotel rooms and the apartments were redesigned with the help of existing, found and donated items and a color concept. The architects designed the garden as a café with a wooden terrace overlooking the sculpture studios of the Academy of Fine Arts.

A few mothers sit on the colorful outdoor chairs with their children, two elderly gentlemen have a lively discussion, a couple leaf through the newspaper – the Ferris wheel is in the background. The entrance area is multifunctional – hotel guests use it as a lobby and young people use it as a living room. Whether for a coffee in between, lunch or the weekly Sunday brunch – magdas makes it possible for tourists, Viennese and people from all over the world to come together.

Another meeting place designed by AllesWirdGut is the in-house canteen: AllesIsstGut. The architectural office AllesWirdGut and the AllesIsstGut canteen are located in a 1970s building directly on the Danube Canal. You can see the office logo in the windows of the building from afar. Every day at lunchtime, you can see the 60 or so employees making the pilgrimage from the fourth and fifth floors to the first floor for lunch. The canteen was created in 2018 with the idea of creating a place of community where people can exchange ideas, eat together and drink their after-work beer together. The canteen also provides a space for the weekly 10vor10 to exchange important information and key points for the coming week before work begins on the fourth and fifth floors.

The furniture can be folded away depending on the situation, so the space can be used individually. As in magdas Hotel, participation plays a role. Every employee is invited to contribute their favorite chair to create a diverse space that reflects all the personalities of the office.

In addition to gaining an insight into the world of work at AllesWirdGut, I was also able to immerse myself in the world of Elfie, the chef de cuisine at AllesIsstGut. We interns took turns every week as Elfie and Siham’s left hand to conjure up the most adventurous lunches for the 60 or so employees. It was a great time, between the pots, the tools and the vegetables – all according to the motto “everything clean, everything great”.

The Baumeister Academy is an internship project of the architecture magazine Baumeister and is supported by GRAPHISOFT and BAU 2019.