Hagemeister, one of the leading German manufacturers of clinker bricks and paving stones, held its first professional seminar for architects in Moscow. This event of the Hagemeister Academy has been an important event in the architectural calendar of Germany for 15 years, and annually brings together about 500 architects and engineers.
The seminar in Moscow - the first such event outside the Federal Republic of Germany - was organized jointly with Hagemeister by the Kirill company and the architectural studio Sergey Skuratov Architects: it was in the studio's spaces that this educational event took place. It is important to note that the workshop of Sergei Skuratov is located in the
the residential complex "Sadovye Kvartaly", for the facades of which Hagemeister clinker was widely used: therefore, the participants of the seminar could, even before it began, only having arrived at the site, personally experience the various advantages of this material.
Russian architects have long and well known Hagemeister products and widely use them: the company has been present on the domestic market for more than ten years, and its important advantage is the possibility of individual development of special sorting and brick formats for a project together with its authors. Therefore, an interested audience for the seminar was guaranteed.
Recently, however, Hagemeister clinker has been used in Russia for especially large and large-scale projects, and it has become a popular topic of the seminar to tell domestic professionals about similar tasks already implemented abroad - or here, but by foreign architects. It was held under the motto City Blocks, that is, "city blocks". It was about the use of clinker and clinker facades in an urban planning manner, when this material determines the perception of not only a building, but an entire block or area of a metropolis, helping - despite the scale of projects - to find a comfortable scale for a city dweller, coordinate new buildings with the environment, create a diverse and attractive environment.
The Hagemeister Architecture Seminar was opened with introductory remarks by Christian Hagemeister, the head of the more than 100-year-old family business, and the program included lectures from leading professionals on their experience of using clinker for large-scale urban projects. Perot Pouliz, Managing Partner of the Amsterdam bureau de Architecten CIE, and his colleague, Associate Partner Jan-Willem Bayens, spoke about their large Moscow project -
residential complex Vander Park. Hagemeister clinker facades of different grades allowed the architects to give dynamics and variety to the volume of the building, to highlight it in the environment - on the north-western edge of the capital, which is experiencing a construction boom. The large size of the complex is obscured by the use of this material, and different types of bricks give each of its towers an individual look, so residents immediately recognize their building among others and feel a kinship with it.
Sergey Skuratov, founder and director of Sergey Skuratov Architects, in his lecture “Brick as part of speech” outlined his twenty years of experience using this material, which he calls a component of his most important professional statements. The architect emphasized that the choice of the type of brick, the type of masonry, the color of the seam is the most important part of the work on the project, and he explained this with a variety of examples. Among them -
an apartment building on Burdenko Street (on the facades - Hagemeister clinker of special Burdenko sorting, as well as Gent), the Garden Quarters ensemble (Gent sorting) and the Egodom residential complex (Lübeck and Gent). An important place in the lecture was taken by the conversation about monomateriality and sculpturality, which Sergei Skuratov considers to be the key themes of his work at the moment - and clinker is ideal for embodying these themes in projects: the architect calls it his favorite material.
The final lecture by Tako Postma, partner of the Dutch bureau INBO architecten, was devoted to the use of clinker for large-scale residential projects. A particular challenge for the architects was the work on multi-apartment high-rise buildings in Amsterdam's Zuidas district, which was originally built up with glass office skyscrapers, and then changed its function from a business to a mixed one. In such an environment, Hagemeister clinker serves as a sign of habitation, warm and traditional - as opposed to the shiny edges next to it. This is also true for
the 900 Mahler tower (Ruhrerde WF grading), and for the 90-meter Intermezzo (Intermezzo HS special grading), where this extremely durable and weather-resistant material was also the only possible solution for a light façade in the humid Dutch climate. The social housing estate Space-S in Eindhoven deserves a special mention, where the inhabitants themselves chose their own Hagemeister clinker grading for each of the buildings, creating a sense of diversity in the new quarter, more characteristic of historical, old districts.
The excursion to the Garden Quarters, which Sergey Skuratov conducted for the participants, became a kind of code for the architectural seminar: she reminded that it is really possible to appreciate the architecture - and the material - only in person, which is not discussed in his speech at the seminar. once recalled the head of Sergey Skuratov Architects. The diverse urban environment of this complex in Khamovniki combines different materials, but the clinker is given the main role. At the same time, it gives the "Garden Quarters" an urban character and reminds of the industrial - brick - past of this territory.
In conclusion, it should be said that the variety of "clinker" themes and projects that the participants of the Hagemeister seminar got acquainted with fully confirmed the words of Christian Hagemeister about the "renaissance of brick" in world architecture, with which he opened the Moscow seminar.
