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Maritim Hotel Berlin |
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Glamorous 1920s-style conference venue
Uniform quality through innovative bathroom pod system
|  | August 2005 saw the hotel capacity in the German capital expand by a full 505 rooms in the four-star-superior category. Apart from its impressive room count, however, the new Maritim Hotel Berlin in the city's Tiergarten district also boasts an event capacity of up to 5,500 persons, underlining its impeccable credentials as an international conference venue. A wide variety of Sopro Bauchemie's products were used in the fabrication of the approx. 500 system-built luxury bathrooms.
The new Maritim Hotel Berlin is prominently located in the heart of Berlin, between the Potsdamer Platz square and the Tiergarten park, in the immediate vicinity of such tourist attractions as the New National Gallery, the Gemäldegalerie art gallery and the Philharmonie concert hall. Designed by Berlin-based star architect Jan Kleinhues, the hotel is widely acclaimed as an exemplary response to a very heterogeneous urban context. Much of the surrounding architecture is firmly rooted in the 20th-century Modernist tradition.
Conference hotel in the heart of the capital
Despite the hotel's colossal proportions, embracing an above-ground area of 42,000 m², the brief underlined the need for a sensitive response to the surrounding "Shellhaus quarter". Old and new are stitched together in the Stauffenbergstraße through a continuation of the eaves height of the existing Shellhaus building and the perpendicular disposition of the tower to the street. The 11-storey tower not only provides a stunning architectural focus, but also marks the hotel's main entrance. The resulting symmetrical corner arrangement reads coherently and engages harmoniously with the new building's context. Moreover, the stepped facade, dropping to a height of around 13 m at the Sigismundstraße end, and the set-back of the storeys above constitute a further response to the massing of the adjoining Gemäldegalerie and residential development.
The hotel facade features sand-coloured, Roman travertine – a further bow to the neighbouring, listed Shellhaus building, designed in 1932 by the celebrated architect Emil Fahrenkamp. Evoking the glamour of the 1920s and 1930s, much of the Maritim Hotel interior is inspired by the art deco and art nouveau styles. The lobby floors and stairways, for instance, are graced by Portuguese Estremoz marble and regal granite. The foyer area plus bar are combinable with the two vast halls to create a gigantic events venue seating 5,500 guests. The sumptuous interior is duly matched by state-of-the-art technical installations, allowing worldwide television broadcasts of film festivals, business receptions, conferences and balls.
Top-quality prefabricated bathroom pods
The same unimpeachable standards were required of the interior fit-out to the 435 exclusive guest rooms, the 71 ambassador, executive, junior and conference suites housed in the suite tower and, naturally enough, the 359 m² presidential suite – the largest of its kind in Berlin. Top priority was given to the bathroom design and fittings in both standard rooms and suites. To guarantee a uniformly high quality for all bathrooms, Schwörer Bauindustrie, a division of SchwörerHaus GmbH & Co. KG, was commissioned to produce the en-suite sanitary pods.
|  |  | A total 461 of the luxury bathrooms were fully prefabricated and pre-fitted with service installations and appliances by Schwörer Bauindustrie at its Ahrensfelde plant near Berlin. System building simplifies the construction management process, cuts construction times and costs, while offering the requisite flexibility and guaranteeing consistently high quality. Sopro Bauchemie products alone were used for waterproofing and for laying and grouting the high-spec wall and floor coverings in the pods. After their prefabrication at the Schwörer plant, the pods were delivered on a just-in-time basis to the site, where they were craned into their respective positions in the building shell.
Sopro products used on project:
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