The Brick Workshop deals with bricks in the town of Holzwickede in the center of the former heavy industrial region of North Rhine-Westphalia in Western Germany. The region and town have a strong history of infrastructure built in local bricks.

The ambition is to reveal the hidden beauty of old brick buildings and facades that survived the war but are slowly disappearing due to replacement or renovation such as exterior insulation. And to show the potential of building with brick, to showcase the unique experience that bricks enable.

Built in 1956 with re-used bricks from destroyed houses, the building was built in the center of the town as housing for town hall employees. It had been retrofitted with exterior insulation in the late 60s and is scheduled to be torn down and replaced in the next years.

This intervention intends to continue using the building and its potential at a prominent site in the town between the marketplace, town park and church, utilizing the brick’s durability by re-using those that are already on site and only introducing very few new materials.

The program will offer a cafe with communal workspaces for home office workers and a bike rental station with a repair workshop that will connect the town center with the northern more industrial part and surrounding larger cities and sights for commutes and day trips.

The house has an exterior cafe area with a take-away counter facing the park and a communal workshop area adjacent on the ground floor. In the yard is more space for working as well as a bike rental station. The first floor contains more cafe seating, a digital workshop and a multi-use space that can serve as a classroom, for meetings or as a communal workspace for home office workers. It is connected to the ground floor via large openings in the floor. The top floors contain shared housing for eight temporary apprentices.

The project is intended as a meeting point, an address in the center of the town that will bring people together: people of the town, people that need to repair something, people that have that knowledge and would like to share it, people interested in learning crafts, nearby companies that have the knowledge and commuters that need to look after their bikes.