The block of wood from Köpenick: Berlin construction company supplies modules for the “Luisenblock” of the Bundestag – Berlin
“Luise” stands not far from the Reichstag building, wears a colorful glass dress and measures seven floors. But above all: Under its facade it consists almost entirely of wood for climate reasons. “Luise” is the nickname for the office building for members of the Bundestag, Luisenblock West, which is expected to be finished in December after just eight months of construction – thanks to the modular timber construction.
It works in a similar way to when children stack building blocks. With the difference that with the Luisenblock a building block weighs six tons and is seven meters long. No risk of swallowing. The company Kaufmann Bausysteme has prefabricated this room module at its location in Berlin-Köpenick.
There, between rows of containers and trucks, people in work clothes are standing and smoking. The industrial park, the “Köpenick industrial site“Is called, is a place of concrete and heavy machinery. The production facilities of half a dozen building materials companies are located here. The headquarters of Kaufmann Bausysteme is in Vorarlberg, Austria. Christian Kaufmann has been managing director in the third generation since 2015 and explains the move to Berlin: “At that time we received an order for three schools, and there would be no point in carting the modules from Austria.”
[Wenn Sie aktuelle Nachrichten aus Berlin, Deutschland und der Welt live auf Ihr Handy haben wollen, empfehlen wir Ihnen unsere App, die Sie hier für Apple- und Android-Geräte herunterladen können.]
In the workshop, work is like on an assembly line. In the first step, cross-glued, solid spruce wood panels are literally pieced together – to form a stable, elongated room with floor, ceiling and walls. This is followed by further expansion stages with windows, heaters and sockets. The 20 or so workers – all men on this day, mostly Germans and Slovenes – repeat their work steps on each room module.
“We can build everything like this,” says the boss
Some of the modules do not have side walls, they are assembled into larger parts on the construction site. Around six modules leave the hall every day, 470 for the Luisenblock, and 2000 in total this year. The modules only need to be stacked on the construction site. “We can build everything like this: hotels, apartments, daycare centers, schools and social centers,” says Kaufmann. “We can also spend our entire life in modular construction,” he says, and it remains unclear whether he means it with a wink. The company is currently producing room modules for 32 school expansions in Berlin under the project name HOMEBS.
The planning conglomerate will therefore voluntarily allow the amount of wood used to grow back within the life cycle of a building and call it the wood cycle concept. 5000 cubic meters of spruce wood are built into the Luisenblock, which, according to Kaufmann, corresponds to 15,000 trees. “It’s not that easy to get so many seedlings in the nursery,” he says.
[Nachrichten aus Treptow-Köpenick lesen Sie kostenlos in unseren Leute-Newslettern. Hier kostenlos abonnieren für Ihren Bezirk.]
Robin Wood press spokeswoman Ute Bertrand warns on the phone: “It is an engineering approach to simply replant the amount of wood used.” A forest is more than its amount of wood. “The quality of the ecosystem is crucial when it comes to deforestation and planting, and plantations can exist,” says Bertrand. Robin Wood describes itself as a non-violent community of action for nature and the environment.
Lorenz Nagel from Primus Development came up with the wood cycle concept. He admits: “When a tree is felled and a new one is planted, there is a time window in which the forest absorbs less CO2 than before.” And not every sapling that is planted BECOMES a large, healthy tree. You have to take both into account, possibly compensating for planting more trees.
Search for projects for ecological forestry
“The funding comes from our profit,” says Nagel. This is a high five- to low six-digit sum. Together with the Federal Agency for Real Estate Tasks (BIMA), which also looks after the federal forest, they are currently looking for the most sensible ways possible to invest this money in ecological forestry projects. Concrete solutions have not yet been found, but Nagel promises: “We will document this and also want to be able to later tell the users of the building where exactly the built-in wood was replanted. It’s a kind of self-control for us. “
The timber construction market is growing, there is already a lack of sawmills. But not everyone thinks about the ecological side of this development, says Lorenz Nagel: “For the real estate industry, wood construction often only means replacing the concrete surface with a wood texture in Photoshop.” And Christian Kaufmann himself warns: “The projects in wood construction are growing so rapidly admitted that sooner or later we will have a problem with the raw material. ”Frugality is also required. For example in the future construction of the room modules, thinks Kaufmann. The stacking gives each module a double floor. Money and wood could be saved there. Because compared to a tried and tested construction method, the price in the shell construction with wood is still 10 to 15 percent higher, says Sauerbruch.
The Luisenblock West was initially advertised as a temporary facility for 15 years. “That hasn’t changed anything for us,” says Matthias Sauerbruch, “and the wooden module construction is also suitable for more than a temporary arrangement.” The building can remain there for 100 years, says Kaufmann. And you know: “Nothing stands longer than a temporary arrangement.”
Martin Spiering, spokesman for the Federal Office for Building and Regional Planning (BBR), the builder of the Luisenblock, assumes that the building will probably stand for longer than 15 years. With the invitation to tender for a provisional solution, they wanted to get suggestions for a speedy schedule. “The new building is important because of the short-term space requirements and in order to be able to evade another building has to be renovated.” Special sustainability was not a requirement in the tender, but the wood cycle principle played a role in the decision. “But it is not part of the contract,” says Spiering.
In October 2019, the BBR began preparing the project for the Luisenblock West, and the first room modules were installed on April 12, 2021. An official handover date has not yet been set, but should be in December. The construction of the Luisenblock West costs a total of 70 million euros. The parliamentary groups will still decide which members of the Bundestag will move into the 400 new offices.
Meanwhile, in the industrial park in Köpenick, Kaufmann Bausysteme WILL be relocating to the adjacent workshop in order to triple its Berlin production. A German offshoot of the company is also to be founded in January of next year.