Where others are still building, tenants are already living here
Competence: Project & Planning
The demand for living space in Berlin is enormous - and space is limited. A new construction is under way in Hohenschönhausen with 172 residential units of a varying sizes. Varying apartment and bathroom floor plans make such building sites complex. To ensure a speedy construction workflow, individually designed and industrially prefabricated registers and wall modules were implemented in the bathrooms in every apartment. The installation times of the sanitary, heating and ventilation pipes are thus drastically reduced; the property can be let on time.
On the 8,100 m² large plot in the Berlin neighbourhood of Hohenschönhausen, a horse-shoe shape residential complex has been under construction since May 2015, comprising a coherent building structure with a total of 7 blocks and around 11,500 m2 of living space. The different apartment types, ranging from one-and-a-half to four bedroom apartments, offer room for different life plans and budgets. In addition, the apartments located on the ground floor are accessible with no barriers. The apartments should be ready to move into at the end of the year. It's an ambitious target: For the general contractor Ten Brinke, a specialist in the construction of turnkey ready residential, industrial and commercial buildings, one of the most effective measures for optimising the construction workflow was the implementation of industrially prefabricated pre-wall registers.
Industrial prefabrications not only guarantees a high quality standard. The crucial point is that costs are fixed from the start and transparent – for the trade enterprise and the builders. This provides all of the participants with additional planning security. Julian Rüsen, the responsible project manager from Ten Brinke, is satisfied: "This isn't the first project where we've used TECEsystem registers. Compared with conventionally constructed pre-walls, we save a good 50 % on installation time thanks to the prefabrication." The registers were individually designed for the four different bathroom floor plans, manufactured in the TECE factory and delivered to the construction in 14 part deliveries ready for connection.
Service on site at the construction site
Ralf Thowesten and Michael Armeloh from TECE in-house technical support were responsible for the problem-free operation on site. Alongside consulting in the run-up, they coordinated the coordination workflows and established the demand for products: "With a project of this size every delay in the construction process represents a financial risk for the building clients. We minimise this risk thanks to the quick lead time for industrial prefabrication and the subsequent just-in-time delivery." The construction of the sanitary systems on Gärtnerstraße went perfectly according to plan. The fitters assembled most of the registers immediately following delivery. If the construction or the capacity didn't allow for immediate assembly, the registers were stored in the TECE container supplied with the first delivery to secure them against theft. The apartments located on the ground floor are all accessible with no barriers. In order to design the shower area free of barriers too, the TECEdrainline shower channel was used here. Thanks to the channel and the tiled floor we were able to do away with partition walls, which gives a generously spacious feeling. Included in the TECEdrainline delivery package is the Seal System sealing tape, which guarantees a permanently sealed connection between the shower channel and the composite seal that has also been tested with a range of different slurry seals. The future tenant in the building complex's four bedroom apartments will be spoiled with two bathrooms: one with a bathtub, the other with a shower. As the bathrooms adjoin each other, the sanitary register also serves as a partition wall here. Thanks to the integrated sound and thermal insulation, the resident won't notice a thing here.
After the plank facing and tiling of the pre-walls came the fine assembly. The universal cisterns contained in the registers were pre-assembled in the factory with filling valves and water connections. The inspection openings are equipped with seals which must be broken first. This procedure complies with the Drinking Water Ordinance. and guarantees the cleanliness and functional suitability of the cistern. The purchaser and landlord of the property, HOWOGE Wohnungsbaugesellschaft mbH, had a choice between multiple variations of flush plates. Three different TECE plates were fitted for selection in the first finished model apartments. The decision was made to go with TECEnow. All TECE flush plates are mutually compatible, ensuring scalability for future renovations or conversions.