Friday, February 27, 2026
“One idea. One future of building.” – SWISS KRONO.
The ‘ONE-BLOCK’ party wall is a highly acoustically insulating, solid timber solution for separating two residential units. Wolf Bavaria and SWISS KRONO developed a solid, dismantlable exposed soundproofing wall comprising acoustically insulating MAGNUMBOARD® OSB and PhoneStar boards with a flexible free-floating core that achieves a very high airborne sound attenuation value of RW = 66 dB. No additional soundproofing is required. The wall is stackable and can be prefabricated. It is connected using only screws, in other words neither spring rails nor acoustic isolation clips are required.
“With ONE BLOCK by SWISS KRONO, we rethink construction: A party wall concept designed for fast, architecturally clear building. Tested airborne sound insulation of Rw = 66 dB in a slim 265 mm build-up.”
Massive performance in a reduced system mindset:
The benefits of the ONE-BLOCK party wall at a glance:
The ‘Innovation Award Architecture + Construction’ was bestowed on the first day of the BAU 2023 in Munich by the architectural journals AIR and AIT-Dialog in cooperation with Messe München. The jury, comprising a number of prominent architects including Veronika Dannheimer and Dionys Ottl, issues it to honour innovative products, materials and systems for forward-looking construction.
The goal is to highlight products and solutions that are particularly well-suited for meeting architects’ needs. When choosing the winners, the jury not only pays attention to functionality and quality of design but also stresses technically intelligent solutions and versatility for a wide range of applications. Out of a field of more than 70 firms with over 100 submissions, Wolf Bavaria and SWISS KRONO received one of four innovation awards for the ONE-BLOCK party wall.
The story behind the idea
While designing a block of flats to be built using wood-based materials, architect Sandra Kuschel of the Hamburg-based real estate developer Kuschel & Fricke Immobilien was looking for a way to achieve a high level of acoustic insulation between the units. Via her construction supervisor, Markus Bartels, she got in touch with the company of 3B TEC, a licensee and producer of the SWISS KRONO MAGNUMBOARD® OSB solid timber construction system. 3B TEC convinced her of the advantages of MAGNUMBOARD®: a high level of prefabrication, lean walls, easily added fire protection, and the ability to directly coat or cover it.
The only item on her wish list that it didn’t meet was enhanced acoustic insulation. “MAGNUMBOARD® is a really great product that we were very interested in working with,” says Kuschel. “We were especially excited by the fact that it can be directly covered with plaster, paint, wallpaper or tiles. But having to mount plasterboard on top of the walls to provide acoustic insulation would have eliminated all of these advantages while greatly increasing costs. So we asked whether integrate acoustic insulation could somehow be directly integrated while still keeping the wall as thin as possible.” The experts of Kuschel & Fricke then went to work with 3B TEC. They brainstormed, developed ideas, tried out different board thicknesses and came up with various designs.
The outcome of all this effort was the ONE-BLOCK party wall. Those involved had set themselves the goal of achieving an acoustic insulation value of at least 60 dB. Wolf Bavaria and SWISS KRONO submitted their brainchild to ift Rosenheim for testing, where it actually exceeded their target with a value of RW = 66 dB!
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Tags: germany, interior, magnumboard, ONE BLOCK, OSB, Swiss Krono, Timber Industry, wood insulation
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