Tallest building in Bielefeld, Germany faced with longest mast climber ever

In 2017, Deutsche Telekom vacated a high-rise building in Bielefeld, Germany. Subsequently, the idea was to convert it into a residential student building. The centrally located facility has 18 floors and stands 76m tall or 95.5m when including the building's telecommunications tower. The Goldbeck Nord GmbH construction company used Scanclimber by Tractel's SC8000 twin unit mast climber with a full-length capacity of 46.2m for the facade renovation work.

Project challenges

Remodeling an office building into a residential building has its own unique challenges. The utilization of floor space in an office is substantially different from that of a residential apartment.

Some of the main challenges of the project were to:

• Increase the living space on each floor
• Disassemble the façade elements by breaking down the concrete
• Install new façade holders
• The façade elements were 46m in length and 17m in breadth

Mast climber solutions

The Goldbeck Nord GmbH construction company bought the building in 2018 and announced plans to remodel it. An architectural design targeting the increased living space and converting the office rooms into residential apartments was conceived. The architectural design was nominated for the "World Architecture Festival 2017" in the "Residential - Future Projects" category.

To disassemble the façade elements, Goldbeck used Scanclimber by Tractel's SC8000 twin unit mast climber with a full-length capacity of 46.2m, making it Scanclimber by Tractel’s most extended mast climber configuration so far. The breadth of the front side of the building is 17 m. Scanclimber® by Tractel® installed two more SC8000 single units with full-length capacity on both sides of the building. The first MCWP was erected in February 2020, and the dismantling job is expected to conclude by April 2021.

The solution conclusion

Scanclimber® by Tractel® had delivered several solutions for renovation projects in Germany before, such as the Blue Horizon Project, where we used noise cancellation panels with the mast climbers. This new renovation project at Belfield validates the versatility of rack and pinion-driven vertical access solutions.