Exposed concrete features large
Many Unterföhring residents call the new community centre the “Culture Brick”. This is not surprising once you know what is looks like from the outside. The building is characterised by its cuboid form and red anodised aluminium exterior and therefore bears a strong resemblance to a brick. Inside there is a multifunctional hall with seating for up to 700. Also housed in the new building are a library and meeting rooms for groups and associations. A small hall on the first floor, rooms for the music school and several studios provide scope for a wide range of cultural activities, which explains why the Unterföhring Community Centre is called the “Culture Brick” and not simply the "Brick".
Successful choice of materials
In the selection of materials, the designers emphasise the clean and reduced form of the Unterföhring Community Centre building. Accordingly, they used as few different materials as possible and exploited light as a design tool. Above all in designing the main circulation space in the building, the foyer, the Guttenberger architects proved they had their fingers on the pulse. Here they combined large glazed surfaces, dark stone floor and light-coloured textured concrete. The surface of the exposed concrete is a lath texture of larchwood with laths of different apparent thicknesses.
Working in conjunction with the architects and the main contractor Berger Bau, Passau, NOE developed the new NOEplast “Foehring” textured formliner. This consists of ten larchwood laths, each 50 mm wide but with different lengths and thicknesses. The textured formliner also has the advantage that it can be extended vertically and horizontally almost without limit, which proved to be particularly useful for the ten-metre-high wall in the foyer of Unterföhring Community Centre. This textured formliner excels – as do all NOEplast textured formliners – through its high fidelity to detail and very good reproducibility. A property that contributed significantly to the success of the architecturally significant foyer of the Unterföhring “Culture Brick”.
