Cleaning Berlin’s largest church The clean cathedral – a mammoth task

The Berlin Cathedral is a huge building, angular and labyrinthine, with many rooms, vaults, towers, columns and stairs, the most diverse types of flooring, walls and ceilings and other materials. A Berlin building service provider took on this mammoth task.It’s no everyday task to keep a cathedral clean. The surfaces are enormous, the spaces astonishingly varied, the range of tasks broad, the requirements flexible, the materials very different and sometimes highly sensitive, and sometimes, areas that are extremely difficult to handle. The decision who to give the cleaning contract to must be carefully considered. A good year ago, the management of the Berlin Cathedral advertised for bids for a mammoth task. Several companies from Berlin, the surrounding area and other German states trusted their own capabilities and submitted their tenders. “After careful review and consideration of all factors and possible aspects, we decided on 3B,” says Lars-Gunnar Ziel, Managing Director of the Berlin Cathedral. He explains further: “The decisive factor for the award was the high competence of the company, its proximity, our trust in the company as well as the price.” In this context, he refers to the company’s first-class references and similar jobs that 3B has taken on, which are all comparable to the demanding cleaning tasks necessary in Germany’s largest church: the DomAquarée, the Office of the Federal President and the Reichstag. “The commission started on January 1, 2015 and is open-ended,” adds Ziel. The task area includes maintenance cleaning of the public areas from Monday to Sunday and the offices from Monday to Friday, for another, the exterior cleaning, winter services as well as special cleaning on request. The public areas include the large outer area of approximately 1,630 square meters, the interior walkways with some 5,630 square meters including the Hohenzollern crypt, sermon, baptismal and wedding church as well as the Cathedral museum, the stairs to the dome, the interior and exterior dome walkways, the imperial staircase including its hall, boxes as well as event rooms, and the Sophie-Charlotte and Henriette-Luise halls. The 32 offices have an area of approximately 1,192 square meters and are cleaned over a five-day period each week. Many individual surfaces and different building partsAmong the features of this exceptional task is that the considerable overall cleaning area consists of many small, often winding and uneven individual surfaces, which are located on different levels, from the Hohenzollern crypt up to the dome. The building, which is comprised of numerous elements, is immense and its structural circumstances are in some cases fairly complicated. “It is not easy to find your way around here if you don’t know what you’re doing,” says Viola Gilgen, operational manager at 3B Dienstleistung Deutschland GmbH. New employees occasionally have their problems. Offices are located in the four towers on the side of the central dome. Nearly 300 steps must be climbed to reach the cupola – and with all cleaning utensils. In addition to the dimensions, the special, sometimes very valuable materials – for example, limestone and wood – must be taken into account. Larger technological equipment can only be partially used; most everything must be cleaned by hand. This is especially true for the many different floor coverings that must be dealt with during maintenance cleaning. These include parquet flooring and carpet in the boxes, event areas and offices, stone and granite slabs in the exterior areas, Solnhofen limestone slabs in the church and Hohenzollern crypt, linoleum in the stairwells as well as tiles and stone in the toilets. The surfaces amount to around 100 square meters of tiles in the toilets and kitchens, 3,500 square meters of limestone, 1,600 square meters of granite in the exterior area, 1,500 square meters of parquet, 800 square meters of linoleum and 1,000 square meters of carpet. To clean all of this and keep it clean, the surfaces are mopped by hand in either one- or two-stage processes. Larger areas are handled accordingly with scrubber dryer machines, parquet flooring mopped with gauze or oilskin, carpets vacuumed and smooth surfaces polished. In addition to automatic scrubber dryers, polishing machines and battery-operated backpack vacuums are used. The cleaning chemicals used by 3B employees in this object include care products for stone, parquet and stainless steel, wood polish, stain remover for carpets, gum remover, sanitary, glass and alcohol cleaner as well as oilskin. For proper handling, the cleaning activities require basic and special knowledge about cleaning offices and sanitary facilities, treating wood, e.g. walls and doors, cleaning and maintaining wall coverings as well as of parquet flooring and special stone flooring. Special services on demand or independentlyThe operational manager, who has worked for 3B for seven years, explained that three full-time employees clean the surface areas on Monday to Friday from 5:00 to 9:00 a.m. Cleaning in the exterior areas must be completed by 10:00 a.m. This essentially involves visible cleaning, from the sweeping of stairs and platforms to the emptying of garbage cans in and around the cathedral. “In addition, a monthly budget of 20 hours is available that we can use at the request of the customer or if we deem it necessary for special work,” explains Viola Gilgen. Among other things, this may in-clude basic cleaning of the toilets and kitchens, removal of stains and gum in the exterior areas as well as maintenance of numerous wood panels and doors. In addition, there are various special operations. In February 2015, for example, the act of state for Richard von Weizsäcker was held in the Berlin Cathedral. “For this purpose, we completely cleaned the public areas in advance. All boxes were cleaned from top to bottom, all corridors from the ceiling to the floor, the entrance portals and passages, the complete pulpit outside and inside,” says the operational manager. “Between and after Christmas and Easter, as well as celebratory church services, we must also remove wax from the floors and carpets as well as the upholstery of the benches.” Every Monday, the object is inspected by the cathedral management. Among other things, the cleaning is also examined. 3B carries out quarterly inspection rounds in the course of quality management, via smartphone and per quality. Otherwise, the cleaning results in and around the building are inspected once every week or two weeks with a visit to the object as well as re-viewed by customers. Cleaning a sensitive areaA special feature of this contract is the cleaning of the Hohenzollern crypt, which contains coffins from five centuries. These were specially cleaned in November 2015. “Normally, we are not allowed to enter these gated areas,” says Viola Gilgen. “In the course of the special cleaning measures, we had to offer special cleaning work for the vulnerable areas. The surfaces around the coffins had to be cleaned, all pillars including their capitals had to be dusted and the metal gating cleaned.” These were cleaned with damp towels and the pillars cleaned with damp covered ceiling brooms. The Solnhofen limestone slabs on the floor were first vacuumed using dust filters, in order to stir up as little dust as possible, and then mopped with a damp mopping tool and gauze cloth using wet fog. “Here, we don’t use any chemicals and only as much water as absolutely necessary in order to keep the humidity in the crypt as low as possible and not damage the coffins,” explained the operational manager. Cathedral Managing Director Lars-Gunnar Ziel is very satisfied with the cooperation up till now and highly values the reliability as well as the cleaning performance of 3B. What is the biggest challenge for the building services provider? “Keeping the Berlin Cathedral ‘dust-free’,” answers Viola Gilgen. “After all, it is a significant public building in the center of the capital that is visited daily by tourists from all over the world. The Berlin Cathedral is the city’s flagship, so to speak, and must always be spic and span.” Dr. Andreas Müller, freelance journalist | markus.targiel@holzmann-medien.de

Cleaning Berlin’s largest church The clean cathedral – a mammoth task

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