Within twelve months, the Braunschweig Student Union is having a 1960s high-rise building completely gutted and renovated with a future 124 residential units for almost €4.6 million. Within seven months, according to the schedule, all technical works must be completed. In order to comply with this schedule without lowering quality standards, the architect planned the entire drinking water installation and the structure of the extremely creative bathrooms completely using products from the Viega compound system.
In the 1960s, students had to be more modest, as the smallest apartments in the high-rise building only measured 11 square metres. As much space as in a medium-sized camper van. In the renovated high-rise of the Braunschweig Student Union, there are no longer any such apartments. Instead, by taking away a wall, two apartments have been merged. But because the then smallest student apartments with 16.3 m² were the measure of everything for the floor plan, they designed a completely new spatial concept for the bathroom, which is normally a very space-intensive place but which could only be a wet cell: the basis is a partially inclined “shower tray” made of stainless steel, which only rises three centimetres despite the underlying Mafund sound insulation. In order to ensure that no space is squandered in the room, this tray was set at an angle in the corner so that there was still space for the risers.
The Architect proved similar creativity with the wall structure of the bathrooms. Instead of wall constructions made of plasterboard, the flexible `Steptec´ system from Viega was used, whose tracks were only cut to precision just before installation. In this way, the walls could be set so tightly as possible, while still balancing out the usual dimensional deviations in the old building.
Integrated Viega systems
