Poor but Sexy: Berlin, the New Communal by Harvard GSD

Frank Barkow / Arno Brandlhuber

Poor but Sexy: Berlin, the New Communal

Spring 2015

Studio Report

Frank Barkow/Arno Brandlhuber

Poor but Sexy: Berlin, the New Communal

Studio Instructors Frank Barkow, Arno Brandlhuber

What new forms for communal dwelling challenge the status quo in a growing city that until recently has been shrinking? How do you add density in a proactive way, understanding current legislation not as an obstacle but as a design tool? These collective student proposals offer provocative solutions to how we live and work in one of the most compelling emerging cities in the world: Berlin.

Seminar Instructors Niklas Maak, Fritz Neumeyer Teaching Assistant Maria Hudl Students Oliver Bucklin, Julian Funk, Nan Liu, Shiqing Liu, Gregory Logan, Giancarlo Montano, Nancy Nichols, Elizabeth Pipal, Christopher Soohoo, Dana Wu Midterm Critics Sandra Bartoli, Sam Chermayeff, Silvan Linden, Johanna Meyer-Grohbr端gge Final Review Critics Regine Leibinger, J端rgen Mayer, Mohsen Mostafavi, Christina Seilern, Jo Taillieu, Jan de Vylder

Title

Introduction

Projects

Poor but Sexy: Berlin, the New Communal Frank Barkow, Arno Brandlhuber

Site 1: Tempelhof

Four Sites Maria Hudl

Architecture Will Ruin Berlin Oliver Bucklin

Manifestos for Post-Familial Housing: Collectivity, Privacy, and the Rise of the New Communal Niklas Maak

Address Address Julian Funk

Living in the Air Shiqing Liu

Site 2: Postbank Tower

I do not seek to make architecture, I only seek to make landscape Gregory Logan

16 18

The Urban Architecture of Berlin: From Schinkel to the Present Fritz Neumeyer Conference: Arch+ Features Legislating Architecture Frank Barkow, Arno Brandlhuber with Maria Hudl

66 78

Postbank: The Delirious Archipelago Giancarlo Montano

Why We Should Stop Designing Dwellings (and Start Designing How to Get to Them) Nancy Nichols

The Split Second Dana Wu

102

Site 3: Karl-Marx-Allee

104

Incomplete Open Housing Nan Liu

116

The Threshold Must Be Active, Never Passive Christopher Soohoo

128

Site 4: Option Lots

130

Against Flexibility Elizabeth Pipal

142

Contributors

Poor but Sexy: Berlin, the New Communal

Frank Barkow, Arno Brandlhuber

Former Berlin Mayor Klaus “Wowi” Wowereit’s claim in 2004 that Berlin is “Arm aber Sexy”—poor but sexy—reflected a post-reunification milieu where cheap rents, radically changing demographics, and a burgeoning art and music scene set the stage.1 Having emphasized large infrastructure projects such as the costly and long-delayed new airport, Wowereit was ousted in December 2014 after ignoring the requirements of everyday citizens—especially the urgent need for new affordable housing and basic civic empowerment. Increasing friction between market-driven speculation and the call for affordable housing is evident in a context where 30,000 new apartments are needed within a current legislative period of five years, with a yearly demand of 6,000. Berlin, as a growing metropolis, lacks sufficient housing after much commercial and cultural expansion. The opportunity lies in creating density in a diffuse, multicentered, layered city. What new sustainable typologies can give form to a new residential urban landscape? How can current legislation be instrumentalized to support these initiatives, or rather, how could legislation reflect new thinking? The studio aimed to provoke new ideas for generating housing density that challenge the status quo. The current political climate suggests a proactive approach in which planners, architects, and developers propose housing solutions that can embed in a historical city without direct precedents or master planning to guide them, instead anticipating and provoking experimental new ideas for an immediate and urgent future. What could be new models for these typologies in which specu-

Approach: In developing these projects, three primary components were addressed: 1. Legislation: What legislative instruments or arguments can be initiated by the project, and how could they drive new forms for housing? These can include (but not be limited to) height limits, setbacks, light and air requirements, occupancy and mixed-use rules, construction methods and materials, building volumes, etc. 2. Technique: As a prototypical response to gain more density in the city or to generate more housing, which architectural techniques are used, whether programmatic, typological, production-oriented, or technological? 3. Site: How do conditions “as found” and on-site inform the design process? What additional program types or initiatives can support housing to generate vital and integrated communities?

Markus Hesselmann, “‘Poor but Sexy’ Is Not Enough: The Rise and Fall of Berlin Mayor Klaus Wowereit,” The Guardian, September 11, 2014.

lation is given the opportunity for remapping economic, zoning, and density conditions as negotiated, not preordained?

Four Sites

Maria Hudl

“Poor but Sexy: Berlin, the New Communal” looked for answers beyond given restrictions. With a focus on Berlin—the capital and with 3.4 million inhabitants the biggest city in Germany— the studio addressed legislation relevant to each of four chosen projects. Fast urban growth and the great need for thousands of new (affordable) apartments annually call for new approaches to densification and development. Site 1: Tempelhofer Feld is the site of the former airport situated in the districts of Tempelhof and Neukölln. The original construction of the airport traces back to the 1920s and under the Nazi government in 1941 underwent monumental reconstruction into a 1.2-kilometer-long building. The airport served national and international flights until its closure in 2008. In May 2010, the 386-hectare former airfield opened as a public park. Site 2: The Postbank Tower, with 23 stories and a total height of 89 meters, is one of the tallest buildings in Berlin. The Tower is located in the district of Kreuzberg, next to Hallesches Ufer, which belonged to the former East Germany. After the postwar division of Berlin and the erection of the wall, West Berlin was in need of a postal banking office of its own. Between 1965 and 1971 the new building was constructed, based on a design by Oberpostdirektor Prosper Lemoine. Site 3: Karl-Marx-Allee is a nearly 89-meter-wide and two-kilometer-long boulevard running through the districts of Friedrichshain and Mitte. In Friedrichshain, the avenue is marked by buildings in the style of socialist classicism, the so-called Zuckerbäckerstil (“wedding cake style”) from the

1950s. In contrast, the western end close to Mitte is dominated by modern panel buildings (Plattenbauten) from the 1960s. The studio focused on the western part, the segment between Straußberger Platz and Alexanderplatz that was designed by Werner Dutschke and Edmund Collein between 1959 and 1964, establishing 14,500 new apartments. Site 4: Parallel to the “gentle urban development” (behutsame Stadterneuerung) of West Berlin in the 1980s, the German Democratic Republic filled empty central plots with Plattenbauten. Due to the prefabricated profiles of this typology, it was almost impossible to add directly to the neighboring building. This resulted in small leftover areas, hidden behind fake facades, between old and new. Based on a research study, Brandlhuber+ identified 58 of these “Option Lots” in the district of Mitte with a total volume of 7,635 cubic meters. All four sites are fairly centrally located within the inner S-Bahn circle. Embedded in four different urban contexts, each site is significant and of great value for future development.

Site 2: Postbank Tower >

< Site 4: Option Lots

Site 3: Karl-Marx-Allee >

< Site 1: Tempelhof

Manifestos for Post-familial Housing: Collectivity, Privacy, and the Rise of the New Communal

Niklas Maak

According to an analysis by the German Federal Institute of Demography, Germany is among the countries with the highest percentage of single-person households. In Berlin and Munich, families are by now almost a marginal group—their share of all households no more than between 14 and 20 percent. How do politicians, planners, architects, and builders respond to this fundamental change? How do the shifts in social rituals, demographic change, and dissolution of the classic nuclear family affect building? At a time when many major crises—including global warming and the 2008 mortgage crisis—are more or less directly linked to problematic dwelling forms, the seminar challenged students to develop and present ideas for alternative housing models and new forms of collective, post-familial living arrangements. With equal emphasis on historical and theoretical analysis, the course investigated the potential offered by various alternative dwelling forms. Initial research started with a field trip to some historical precedents, particularly from the 1960s in Paris, where experimental housing projects redefining the relationship of private and communal space, and new forms of collective dwelling, were encouraged by the state. Architects such as Renée Gailhoustet, who designed the Ivry communal housing complex; Claude Parent and Yona Friedman; and more recently, Lacaton & Vassal have pushed the conceptual boundaries of housing, allowing urban actors to define their habitats in various ways. Interviewing them, students researched the

history of mass housing since 1960 as a domain of communal experimentation. Students’ research demonstrated under what technological and political circumstances the projects were realized, what production systems were deployed, and how these models could be repurposed to respond to contemporary problems. In a second step, current models for new forms of communal life were discussed, among them the R50 Project, a six-story building that centers on the concept of communal spaces, in Berlin’s Kreuzberg neighborhood. In discussions with both architects and residents, students were asked to reflect also on the notions of privacy and collectivity that are crucial in reframing communal dwelling but seldom subjected to critical analysis. Students were invited to read recently published treatises arguing against single-family dwellings, such as Riken Yamamoto’s manifesto “Community Area Model,” and to discuss theories of privacy that developed around these questions, notably Raymond Geuss’s dissection of the history of privacy and Jacques Derrida’s theory of “unconditional hospitality.” According to an analysis by UNESCO and Deutsche Bank, over the next 20 years one billion new apartments will be needed to house migrants who move to urban areas in Asia, Africa, Latin America, and India. What will the hundreds of millions of dwelling units look like? What are the forces that might drive these new types? Given these questions, the seminar aimed to instrumentalize research activities toward new forms of collective dwelling and communal housing, and to speculate on where this research might lead.

The Urban Architecture of Berlin: From Schinkel to the Present

Fritz Neumeyer

Urban architecture can be understood as a social concept in which public and private interests intersect, and communality and individuality are mediated. Organizing and giving form to the private and public spheres and their connection, the architect must not only develop an idea about how people could, should, and want to live together, but know how to transpose these ideas into three-dimensional reality. What constitutes the specific urban potentials of architecture, in both theory and practice, is therefore a relevant question. The seminar opened with a brief introduction to the theoretical foundations of urban architecture, starting with Leon Battista Alberti’s “six elements” of architecture and the metaphor of the “house as a small city” and vice versa—the “city as a large house.” This basic quest for both an architecture with explicit urban capacities and an urbanism related to the city as a performance of architecture was explored with reference to Camillo Sitte’s investigation into the phenomenological conditions of urban space, as well as by Colin Rowe and Fred Koetter’s Collage City with its illuminating analysis of the figure/ground phenomenon and the object/texture relationship. The postmodernist discourse of typology and morphology, memory and imagination (Aldo Rossi, Oswald Mathias Ungers) was a topic of discussion, along with the important distinction between the optical and the tactile perception of architecture, as made by Walter Benjamin. Berlin is a city that offers a rich tradition of urban architecture. The seminar followed the theoretical review by analyzing

a selection of eminent built work through study of Gilly and Schinkel and their notion of the modern building-individual; the development of the 19th-century building-block system and the reform movement of 1910 (Messel, Behrens, Gessner); the modernist interventions of the 1920s (Mies van der Rohe, Taut); postwar planning (ScharounÂ&#x2019;s Kulturforum); the postmodernist experiences of the International Building Exhibition during the 1980s (Kleihues, Krier, Eisenman); and recent projects built after the reunification of Berlin in 1990, when vast open spaces in the center of the city demanded reurbanization (Piano, Jahn, Kollhoff, Nouvel, Ungers, Rossi). The analysis of those case studies sought to discover specific architectural and social qualities and formal characteristics that determine the urban performance, or behavior, of buildings, in terms of their spatial presence with respect to both the urban texture and the architectural articulation of surfaces, mediating between inside and outside and framing public space.

Conference: ARCH+ features Legislating Architecture

Frank Barkow Arno Brandlhuber with Maria Hudl

March 2015

With Frank Barkow, Architect, Harvard Studio Berlin; Jochen Becker, curator and critic; Arno Brandlhuber, Architect, Harvard Studio Berlin; Sam Chermayeff, Architect; Florian Hertweck, Architect; Regine Leibinger, Architect; Niklas Maak, Author and Journalist; Imke Mumm, Technical University of Munich; Fritz Neumeyer, Architect; Markus Rosenthal, Managing Director, nuances; Dubravka Sekulic, Architect; Jean-Philippe Vassal, Architect; and the Students of the Harvard Graduate School of Design Studio, Berlin.

In addition to the numerous preconditions that exist before the design of architecture can begin (gravity, geometry, program etc.) it is the power of text that is focused on. These pre-conditions or regulations are known to planners and designers as rules, zoning, or code and are accepted as unavoidable conditions that can be â&#x20AC;&#x153;interpretedâ&#x20AC;? in the best case. Can these preconditions be considered as proactive instruments or tools for design rather than obstacles? Can the designer be instrumental in establishing these conditions rather than the recipient of them? How can legislation be instrumentalized to support initiatives or rather how could legislation adopt new thinking? All of these questions followed the studio throughout the semester with answers stimulating new ways of thinking. The conference discussed the studio topic with architects, urban planners, researchers, writers and art editors, a lobbyist, and the Senate Department for Urban Development and the Environment. The limitations of legislation and how this creates form were introduced by looking back into the history of building regulations. Together with examining realized examples and case studies of student projects, the necessity of new building typologies and dwelling concepts for future housing was addressed. How is the legal definition of privacy and common ground shaping our idea of dwelling? How could we regain the power to define these terms ourselves? What if some restrictions of legislation could be alleviated to seek for a both/and instead of an either/or approach?

Firstname Lastname For more information, see: http://www.archplus.net/home/news/7,1-11380,1,0.html

Site 1: Tempelhof

After its closing in October 2008, the airport remained abandoned until it was reopened as a public park in May 2010. In March 2013, a master plan for the future development of Tempelhof Field was presented by the Senate Department for Urban Development and the Environment. In opposition to the Senate’s idea of building as many as 4,700 apartments on the open field, Berlin citizens together with the initiative “100% Tempelhofer Feld” won the public debate to keep the field as a public park. The “THF law” of June 24, 2014, excludes any kind of construction on the field. The field is divided into “Zentraler Wiesenbereich,” the inner zone that includes the taxiways of the former airport, and the “Äußerer Wiesenring,” the outer buffer zone. The former airport building is not included in the THF law.

For more information, see: http://www.thf-berlin.de/en/ http://www.stadtentwicklung.berlin.de/aktuell/pressebox/archiv_volltext.shtml?arch_1309/nachricht5063.html

Architecture Will Ruin Berlin

Oliver Bucklin

your economic status, but generally one cannot determine much about someone by the facade of the building they live in. Berliners do not need architecture to differentiate themselves—they already do that just fine through cultural identity and personal expression. Development of speculative architecture would push a new set of values on the city, one in which economic status becomes conflated with personal expression. The diversification of architecture would cause a homogenization of urban life as people are coerced into traditional rat-race jobs in the quest to move out of the Plattenbauten and into the condos. This city needs more housing, but only to keep the cost low. The new housing must be realized in a way that prevents the imposition of typical capitalist values on the city. It must not create privileged positions of dominance over the public realm but instead allow the truly public amenities to get the best view, the exciting form, the object of desire. By keeping a homogeneous housing stock, those from varied demographics can mix within neighborhoods and buildings. By rendering economic differences invisible, we can propagate the cultural differences that truly make this city special.

What makes this city great? It’s not the architecture. The buildings here, apart from a few gems, are bland if well constructed. The homogeneity of the Plattenbau feels like a curse that casts a monotonous pall over the city, a remnant of a bygone era that was at once hopeful of the possibility of world peace after World War II and yet awed at the might of the capitalist and communist empires that held Berlin as their economic battleground. The Soviet Union has since fallen, and the mighty forces of corporate capitalism have swept across the earth and conquered Paris, St. Petersburg, and San Francisco. Berlin is the last stronghold of socialism in the world, and we must protect it. Architecture stands out, buildings blend in. Architecture creates difference; it defines spaces and forms that are visible to the city but inaccessible to the people. Architecture means something. Style, whether neoclassical, modern, or avant-garde, carries symbolic meaning that serves the owner of the building. Those who commission buildings are the elite, powerful and wealthy. Their buildings serve to reinforce their status, their might, and their fortunes. To allow new architectural icons to rise in Berlin would be to enable the forces of capital to assume a prominent position in the city. A high-rise luxury condominium tower would be visible from across the city and symbolize the status of its inhabitants. It would create an air of difference, a class separation that creates desire and inferiority. The same would be true of modern low-rise infill projects with an all-glass facade or abstract avant-garde blobitecture. These buildings would leap out from the urban fabric and proclaim, “Look at me, I’m important, envy me!” The magic of this city is that everyone lives in the same apartment. Of course the neighborhood you live in says something about

Architecture Will Ruin Berlin

24 Berlinâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s residents voted to reject development on its beloved Tempelhof Field, a recently closed inner-city airfield, choosing instead to protect it as open space. I propose to peel up the edges of the park to insert housing and other program underneath, thus activating the edges of the park with dense urban space while creating a green valley within that reinforces the ecological and recreational goals of the referendum.

Oliver Bucklin The site required planning for nearly eight kilometers of border, with urban context ranging from sports facilities to modernist Plattenbauten to freeway and rail lines. The building envelope was limited by height restrictions, the goal of matching the existing context, and the need for protection of airfield taxiways and wildlife areas.Â

Early 1900â&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Mietskaserne

City park and Cemeteries

StraĂ&#x;enbahn

Autobahn and StraĂ&#x;enbahn

Each condition was considered individually, but incorporated into a unified building envelope code. The traditional 22-meter Berlin building height is maintained in existing urban areas, but over the autobahn, the ridgeline grows and becomes a towering wall.

Architecture Will Ruin Berlin

Tempelhof Terminal

Boulevard with Plattenbau

Oliver Bucklin Above: I developed typologies to build a vocabulary of building forms that would maintain 100 percent of the park area as public inhabitable green space, with varying degrees of housing unit exposure.

Following spread: The sections show the most problematic part of the scheme, where a 60-meter height and over-100-meter depth necessitate extreme measures to bring light and air into housing units. The building peels up from the ground in a slab that is never more than three units deep and is supported on the edge by point towers of more housing units. Deep cuts bring light all the way through the slab down to the ground, and public park access is granted at multiple levels.

Fully public park covers entire structure, maintaining original projected park area.

Urban and public amenities at ground level

29 Canyon typology allows light and air access for apartments while maximizing park area.

Address Address

Julian Funk

Complaints Recently, the term address has become associated with the alphanumeric coding that serves as a socioeconomic index for uber-luxury condominiums such as those springing up in Central Park South in New York. But these limp coordinates fail to foster a community and therefore fail to demarcate a place. Despite their location at the heart of the city, these architectures do not participate in the life of the city and are therefore inherently anti-urban. This disposition is easily read in the impossibly thin, super-tall form of these luxury towers, which forcefully express their individuality and their desire to exist above and separate from the city. This disturbing relationship is akin to Bentham’s watchman at the center of the Panopticon—a power relationship in which the other addresses are cell numbers. This, however, is not necessarily worse than the color-coded and hyper-individualized units that seek to divide mass housing projects into a collection of personalized addresses. These projects tend to misplace the symbiotic qualities of housing, killing by design any community communication, and then attempt to cover up the deed by stressing the individuality of the residents on a scale that can only be described as overcompensating. In Jacques Tati’s film Playtime, a sequence in which M. Hulot observes residents through their ultra-modern floor-tofloor windows condemns a vision for urbanity ironically not for the lack of individuality in each apartment but for the banality of the frame. Life Where We Know It Films, especially those like Tati’s Playtime, are particularly effective in revealing, analyzing, and critiquing models of urbanity because they place people and human interests in the built environment, something architects frequently fail to do. This is puzzling given that the lives of people make up the most essential element of dwelling.

Richard Linklater’s film Before Sunset describes this beautifully. The film begins with the typical establishing shots of Paris neighborhoods, gardens, and apartment block courtyards, but something is not quite typical. What Linklater is actually showing us is a path—the very path that the film’s protagonist couple traces across their walking conversation over the next 90 minutes. In a series of sequences that move from a small bookstore to the female lead’s apartment, Linklater reveals the role of personal address as the two main characters literally and figuratively walk each other through the past years of their lives. The establishing shots in this case do not point to an ambiguous idea of Paris but instead prime the audience for the couple’s spatial complement. The notion of personal address is especially pertinent in the age of mass communication— increasingly, personal identification is dependent on digital addresses rather than geopolitical localities. Yet it would be foolish to assume that increased accessibility to remote communities negates the importance of local communities and place-making. Like the path in Before Sunset, the physical address is the spatial continuum that offers both the origin of personal identity and the testing ground for ideas disseminated remotely. This binary has pushed the physical requirements from the generic (the idea of Paris) to the specific (the path). Architects must describe this address. The address must describe the spatial and behavioral relationship between the individual and the community. And despite the earlier evocation of Paris, with all of its nostalgic undertones, that gesture need not be grand in scope or glamorous in likeness. Although problematic for other reasons, the Smithsons’ Robin Hood Gardens creates a strong, identifiable, and spatial address. A collection of units, themselves with their own preconfigured dispositions, gather and indeed inflect toward a central common, itself characterized by a small hill. A visible community is formed by the shaping of a space and making of a place, and all of this with a mound of dirt.

Terms When considering the elements of dwelling, it is easy to list the door, the hearth, the bed—any number of physical indicators of human inhabitation—but the notion of address figures as a less conspicuous but ultimately equally formative element. When addressing someone in speech, the speaker is both placing the audience contextually relative to the speech’s content and placing themselves relative to the audience. Address as the communication and index of collective relationships directly translates urbanistically, where address is the base term for negotiating both social and spatial relationships.

Address Address

32 200,000 square meters; 1,230 meter linear length; radial array from 3 south of west to 13 east of north.

Julian Funk Units are organized radically and by southern light: single-loaded housing bars shift to matte-scheme terrace housing.

Berlin housing needs: 6,000 units. Previous site proposal: 4,800 units. Site proposal: 1,500 units. 50â&#x20AC;&#x201C;150 square meters per unit; 1â&#x20AC;&#x201C;4 bedrooms. Over 30,000 square meters uninterrupted interior space.

Address Address

Julian Funk The aggregation of terrace housing creates an uninterrupted public space that continues the semi-interior space of the Tempelhof Hangar, providing programmatic and identifiable address for each community.

Address Address

Julian Funk

Address Address

Julian Funk

Living in the Air

Shiqing Liu

skyscrapers, or under a bridge. And you leave the ground open. You do not touch the ground, you don’t privatize it, you don’t take it away from the community. You dwell in the air. You are hovering, weightless, above the common ground; you are nesting in higher spheres. Living in the air is a countermodel to strategies of occupying, barricading, and claiming public space for private use. Living in the air transforms the cityscape and allows it to become a forest, a lake, or a playground, inviting people to come and enjoy things happening there. Living in the air is a political statement against the parcellization of the common ground. Living in the air turns the city into an inclusive landscape that belongs and offers free access to everybody.

The word “private” comes from the Latin privatus, meaning not belonging to public life. This is what dwelling means to us: You take away a space from the collective, you fence it in and declare it yours and defend it against others’ desires. The fight to privatize common ground shapes the form of the modern Western city. But could privacy and dwelling be imagined differently, as less violent and colonizing? How about not touching, not claiming ground anymore? How about living in the air? The euphonious songs of birds will wake you up from last night’s sweet dreams; flowers and tree leaves will give you a fresh breath of air whenever you need it; sunlight always plays around your window, looking forward to saying hello; a roof garden allows you to plant, rest, or even have a swim. Living in the air, you get a better view, sunlight, and fresh air; you explore and exploit the vertical possibilities with your neighbors; you revalue and reactivate unclaimed urban space, such as that on the roof, in between two

Living in the Air

44 The 1.2-kilometer roof of Tempelhof Airport was designed to allow 80,000 people to stand and watch Nazi aircraft shows. This proposal is to fully exploit the load-bearing capacity to support an equivalent weight of housing. It would dedicate the ground level to landscape and public amenities, serving residents, people from Tempelhof Field, and other city inhabitants.

Shiqing Liu The roof is supported by giant cantilevers that are offset by hidden weight at the shorter end. The adjacent part is composed of primary structure and secondary trusses, linked by side and linear connections. Although the structure is huge, each micro unit within is domestic. The two-by-six-meter unit could accommodate a staircase, kitchen, bathroom, and storage.

Living in the Air

48 To maximize the number of housing units, calculations of combinations of various material densities were carried out, showing that each bay (formed by two primary structures) could hold 18 wood + glass + translucent boxes. And following the logic of the cantilever structure, the chess pattern of 2/2/3/3/4/4 level arrangement is decided.

Shiqing Liu Primary structure

Secondary structure

Living in the Air

50 Landscape + Public Amenities

Housing

The section shows how people use the old elevator cores to approach the roof, the varied levels of hanging units, and the topographical ground as landscape and public amenities, casually connected to the old airport. It also shows the space shared by those units on different levels. By squeezing service functions, the primary levels could be shifted freely, enabling the patterns mentioned in the plan.

Shiqing Liu Residents first approach the roof, then use the circulation to arrive at each unit and use staircases in each unit to approach each room. The plan arrangement on each level always follows the mode that three similar kinds of rooms are together, facing a shared space, as an addition to the functions inside each unit (e.g., three kidsâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; rooms could share a playground; three kitchens could share a barbecue; three bedrooms could share a spa, etc.).

Site 2: Postbank Tower

In 2014 the former post office building was sold to an investor with the goal of developing the newly available four-hectare plot. The site is next to architect Oswald Mathias Ungersâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s court complex at Hallesches Ufer and consists of the 89-meter-high tower, a primary school, and a nursery. Future urban design calls for a combination of one million square meters of modern urban living space with up to 1,000 new apartments.

For more information, see: http://www.cg-gruppe.de/immobilien/projekte/in-vorbereitung/x-berg-tower---hallesches-uferquartier/18089

I do not seek to make architecture, I only seek to make landscape

Gregory Logan

The world is beset by people with answers. Architects have answers. And we are drowning; we are overrun by an interminable horde of answers. We publish too many books, we organize too many exhibits, we convene too many symposia. I am not concerned with answers, with ends. I am fascinated only by the middle, the “transversal movement” between valences where “things begin to pick up speed,” the gray haziness where things flutter in and out of existence. For is not gray the most beautiful of colors? From the milky obscurity of ash to the shadowy depths of gunmetal, I see a veil of unrest, a twilight beset by unseen forces. Hidden in the charged, subtle tonalities of gray is an ekphrastic landscape latent with history, memory, and nostalgia, a four-dimensional vista in which narrative and craft are more appropriate tools than rigorous logic or systematized perimeters. For gray is the color of landscapes; it is, at once, spatially contained yet transcendent to boundaries. Grey is monadic and monastic, wistful in its isolation, yet in the misty murk of its evanescence, the horizons of autonomous objects may begin to bleed into an awful oneness. It is here, therefore, in the oneiric obscurity of the gray, that the differences between the sublime and the beautiful can be articulated. And it is here, in inward moments of quiet contemplation, that I realize that I do not want to make architecture, only landscapes.

I do not seek to make architecture, I only seek to make landscape

58 The project is essentially an investigation of the hinge space between landscape and architecture, namely the point at which the building meets the ground. This is accomplished through a three-step process. First, through a subtle, one-story modulation of the ground plane, space can be captured through the formation of raised platforms and sunken courtyards. Second, housing blocks are raised onto plinths supported by a series of piers, allowing for a more seamless flow between spaces.

Finally, a series of grand staircases course their way between the piers and bridge the sectional shifts in the modulated ground plane. With these three elements in concert, the architecture is able to control pace and sequencing, and creates a space where public and private circulation modes are encouraged to intermingle, realizing the urban mission of architecture at the level of the detail.

Gregory Logan The diagrams demonstrate how the simple modulation of the ground level can add great complexity to the overall topographic experience of place. In this scheme the vertical elements (i.e., the buildings) and, more important, how they meet the ground, become the critical elements that not only bridge horizontal and vertical but also provide transitional space between the differences in the inflected ground plane.

I do not seek to make architecture, I only seek to make landscape

60 As public vertical circulation (the grand staircases) mingles among private vertical circulation (the piers), a dialogue wrought in the footsteps of each is allowed to take place between locals and visitors. The array also demonstrates the adaptability of the system in bridging longer and shorter spans as well as courtyards and platforms.

Gregory Logan

Postbank: The Delirious Archipelago

Giancarlo Montano

F___ wakes up on the first day of spring.

He remembers, as a child, sleeping in a tiny apartment in Queens, New York, in a room with his brother. The window is small and faces the back of another house, so they never know what time of day it is. His mother screams at them to be ready for the bus. He stumbles out of bed. His brother cannot even deal. He just stays asleep.

Their mother come into the room and starts yelling at them to get dressed, or they’ll miss the bus. “You two are useless!” she says. “Hurry up, I’m going to be late for work! You guys need to be out of the house!” This was ages ago. Long before his mother got a job in the Sunbelt and moved them out of that dark apartment. Long before she had to buy a car to get around the sprawling suburban town that she moved to. Long before she bought a house that was perhaps too expensive, with a mortgage that she had to work her butt off for, because she thought anything would be better than paying high rent every month for a small apartment with tiny windows, noisy neighbors, and stale air. F___ wakes up on the first day of spring. His apartment is flooded with light. It’s a little pricey, but rent in Berlin is nothing like rent in New York. Anything is better than paying for a tiny, dark apartment in Queens.

Berlin: A Green Archipelago, the subtitle of The City in the City, by Oswald Mathias Ungers and Rem Koolhaas (1977), operates on the premise of preparing Berlin for a shrinking footprint in light of political circumstances at that time. Berlin now confronts the issue of a growing population that dissolves the model of housing for the traditional nuclear family in favor of a healthy mix of social dwelling types designed for residents ranging from the transient single to a young family, and including the elderly. Koolhaas’s Delirious New York explains the device of vertical city building as a means to deal with a massive population, displacing the land consumed by the footprint of the building with a new conception of the world on every floor. One conceptualization is horizontal, the other vertical. One points out the differences among the urban fragments that act as landmarks on the mental map of the city, while the other relegates itself to a neutralizing gridded block structure and contains its differences within the block. My proposal, in the vein of juxtaposing concepts and extracting meaning from them, is a consolidation of these two manifestos to promote high density in Berlin while embracing the city’s inherent desire for heterogeneity. Each “Hof” is a new world, but they are based on historical conceptions of the city’s urban block structure.

everyone has a right to EVERYONE HAS A RIGHT TO the city. THE CITY.

everyone has a right to EVERYONE HAS A RIGHT TO the THEsky. SKY.

From top to bottom: Stefan Schilling, Tacheles, 1991. Philipp von Recklinghausen, Schonhauser Allee 5, 1991. Ben de Biel, Installation vor dem Bode-Museum, 1991.

Postbank: The Delirious Archipelago

everyone has a right to EVERYONE HAS A RIGHT TO privacy. PRIVACY.

Giancarlo Montano Hof and Tower Lexicon. In developing a methodology, the two dominant urban building types on the site were taken into consideration. The intent was to explore a lexicon of “Hof” (courtyard) and tower to understand how a dialogue between the two typologies could inform the site. As means of evaluating how the formal consequence of the “Hof” and tower would play out experientially, each piece of the catalog was checked against the premise that everyone in the building should have access to privacy, to the city, and to the sky.

H fro of w m ith St re Tow et Ed er A ge wa y

H of

H fro of D m isa To ss w oci er at e

H at of w St it re h T et Ed owe ge r

Postbank: The Delirious Archipelago

74 As a means of studying the inclusion of the tower in the â&#x20AC;&#x153;Hofâ&#x20AC;? typology, these collage studies demonstrate how the street facade and roof profile are affected. This exhibits the difference between a tower on the street edge and a tower set in the courtyard.

Giancarlo Montano This demonstrates the extrusion of an urban set piece above the 22-meter restriction and how it affects the quality of the street facade.

Postbank: The Delirious Archipelago

Aim of 10 Postbank meters

Proposal s units on si

Aim of 100,000 square meters or 1,000 units on site. Postbank Tower is approximately 30,000 square meters. Proposal stands at 180,000 square meters or 1,800 units on site, including the Postbank Tower.

Giancarlo Montano

Why We Should Stop Designing Dwellings (and Start Designing How to Get to Them)

Nancy Nichols

To design authentically communal communities, we must devote our attention to circulation above all else. Three formal tenets for communal housing: 1 Dwelling space is free to fill any shape, according to the wishes of the individual dweller. 2 Wet functions should occupy extruded space, stacking within cores for economy, efficiency, and serviceability. 3 Only the enduring ratio of rise to run regulates circulation space. Circulation may occupy extruded space if we alternate the orientation of a sequence of stairs to form a stairwell, or it may carry us ever forward as we move up.

Whether we are talking about a detached house or one apartment among many, the boundary of the dwelling defines the private domain of the dweller. Once inside this domain, we do not experience the aggregation of so-called units around us, only the monadic interior. Choosing to live in housing, as opposed to a house, reflects a conscious decision to live in community with others. It follows that architects of housing should not set out to design houses. Leave the arrangement of individual dwellings to individual dwellers; they know their own needs best. Housing architects must instead design good communal space to support healthy communities. And circulation space is the most essential category of communal space because, unlike a garden or bonus room, it cannot be appropriated for private use—it must be shared in order to function. The structure of circulation space articulates the structure of a community. With whom and how many we share a hallway, landing, or street determines the quantity of our daily interactions with our neighbors, while the particular characteristics of these spaces affect the quality of our meetings. Thus circulation spaces serve what has been called the “ethical function” of architecture, telling us how to be in the world and how to relate to it.

up or over?

Why We Should Stop Designing Dwellings (and Start Designing How to Get to Them)

3 81

Nancy Nichols

3 2 1 5

Five circulation studies. Overview: A suite of five building typologies occupies a spectrum between high-rise tower and fine-grained mat building.

1 Postbank Tower area: 28,000 m2 160 units FAR 7,5

Extreme 1: High-Rise Tower Retrofit. The desire to maximize occupiable area and views in the existing Postbank Tower triggered several UnitĂŠ-inspired explorations. The existing elevator cores remain in all schemes. A second, mid-rise tower (building 2) takes advantage of the oversized north elevator core from the original tower, but the second egress zipper racks to accommodate the new buildingâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s proportions. This geometric maneuver carries over into the facade, which begins to shift from floor to floor, opening up surface area for private outdoor space.

2 Racked Mid-rise area: 16,000 m2 60 units FAR 6

Why We Should Stop Designing Dwellings (and Start Designing How to Get to Them)

2 Racked Mid-rise area: 16,000 m2 60 units FAR 6

1 Postbank Tower area: 28,000 m2 160 units FAR 7.5

Nancy Nichols

3 Mietskaserne inhabitable area: 9,000 m2 60 units FAR 2

Extreme 2: Low-Rise Mat. Referencing the hyperdense Mietskaserne of early industrial Berlin, this terraced mat building steps down toward the canal, capturing southern sun in its intimate light courts. As the floors rise toward the back of the building, the courts open out to allow sufficient daylight exposure. The roof is accessible from ground to top.

Hybrid: Mid-Rise Tower. A rhythmic recurrence of internal stairs shifts floor plates in building 3 by half-levels, dividing spaces within each of its units sectionally. The much more compact floor plate in building 3 pushes the courts of the previous typology out to the front of the building.

Why We Should Stop Designing Dwellings (and Start Designing How to Get to Them)

88 4 Undulating Iceberg inhabitable area: 12,500 m2 50 units FAR 2

Hybrid: Expanded Mat. Underneath public stairs at each roof terrace level, residents can enter primary and secondary vertical cores, so that every unit has direct access to both shared courtyards and public roof-top amenities.

Nancy Nichols

5 Expanded Mat inhabitable area: 24,000 m2 accessible roof area: 2.000 m2 resident courtyard: 2,000 m2 200 units FAR 2,5

Circulation as social amenity.

Why We Should Stop Designing Dwellings (and Start Designing How to Get to Them)

Nancy Nichols View to Postbank lawn (northeast).

The Split Second

Dana Wu

Urban dwelling is the split second when: • the crosswalk turns green and the small crowd of strangers gathered at the edge of the curb stride together across the street before going on their separate ways; • the fire alarm goes off and you gather impatiently outside your office in the cold with hundreds of people you’ve never met; • the lights go on at a crowded bar at closing time and suddenly you are torn away from private chatter, distracted by the faces of all of the other people in the room; • your downstairs neighbor (whose name you don’t know) steps into the elevator with you at 4 a.m. It is the task of the urban architect to expand and prolong these split seconds of commonality. How can we work with both the blessing and the curse of living in the city that forces us into one collective or another? We should pursue dwelling that allows us to lead our own lives that from time to time inexplicably snap into alignment with those of others. The paradox is that the city dwelling must be designed simultaneously with reference to the prolonged backdrop of routine activity and the crucial moment of the split second. After all, the instantaneous connection can exist only in a sustained state of detachment. Thus the profound moments of dwelling in the city depend on rules that can be broken, daily habits that can be disrupted, and independent strands of thought or architecture that can converge. Each building, each unit, and each bedroom is autonomous, but brought into inevitable and perhaps uncomfortable encounter. Pause the split second, and fill it with dwelling.

The Split Second

GREG LOGAN, GIANCARLO MONTANO, NANCY NICHOLS, DANA WU

“Context Envelope” formed by the space between the height of the Postbank Tower and the surrounding buildings. The project aims to mediate between these disparate objects by creating a framework within which multiple architectures can simultaneously and synthetically coexist on the highly heterogeneous site, finding moments—split seconds—of commonality.

Dana Wu Aerial view of the urban scheme.

The Split Second

96 Hinge studies exploring impacts of shared cores or amenities on the building itself and on the urban space it creates outside of it.

Dana Wu

(1) The existing Postbank Tower spawns another tower that borrows its core and produces common program at their overlap.

Hinge Type A: co-working space with ramping circulation.

(2) Elsewhere on the site, a similar hinging occurs between a 12-story building and a 3-story townhouse.

Hinge Type B: cafĂŠ or reading room.

(3) The result is an urban kit of parts where heterogenous architectures meet and find shared program along their hinged spines.

Hinge Type C: a detached stair.

The Split Second

100 Typical plan. In any given plan, the cut contains multiple dwelling typologies. Maisonettes with garden levels, compact studio units, and two-bedroom family units abut one another, and at their point of contact

is a shared moment. Some buildings touch and simply share a structural element and a core; others might share a library, gym, supermarket, or other urban amenity.

101

Dana Wu View from the canal. The image of the new city block is one of difference.

102

Site 3: Karl-Marx-Allee

Within the â&#x20AC;&#x153;Urban Livingâ&#x20AC;? competition initiated by the Senate for Urban Development and the Environment, the section of Karl-Marx-Allee between Alexanderplatz and Strausberger Platz is one of eight sites that raised the question of how to add density to the existing housing block, primarily of the Plattenbau typology. The revitalization of the Plattenbau can benefit from examples of new designs for affordable dwelling and ways of communal living. A general improvement in the quality of urban life and a commitment to cooperation is strongly needed to make an impact in this context.

For more information, see: http://www.barkowleibinger.com/archive/view/urban_living_berlin http://june-14.com/2014/urban-living-competition/ https://urbanliving.berlin.de/i/urbanliving/page/Karl_Marx_Allee

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104

Incomplete Open Housing Manifesto

Nan Liu

—Riken Yamamoto

1 Current housing systems are overdesigned and determined as a closed system, in terms of both visual form and social function. East German Plattenbau blocks are an extreme example. The repetition of the same house layout created a standard house, and this standard house fixed a standard family. Housing thereby became a “training device” for standardizing a specific social structure. 2 The Incomplete Open Housing Project aims at breaking up the closed Plattenbau blocks from the inside. The initial transformation started from the hypothesis: “What if residents of the Plattenbau could rent out their homes?” Each step of the transformation would be triggered by social behavior: the growth, shrinkage, or replacement of the existing family structure. 3 The layout of living units is left ready for further growth or change. A system of terraces, stairs, and inhabitable spaces will be added to the existing structure like a stage for experimentation, a countermodel, a porous second building where people meet, act, and operate in different ways. The added structure—which will be rented out by the inhabitants of the Plattenbau—is also an economic model to challenge the capitalist parameters of urban dwelling: What if urban self-empowerment were not

only a hippies’ game with no consequences but rather a practice to challenge the economic system behind the way we have to dwell? 4 There is no reason for keeping the autonomy of closed housing anymore. The Incomplete Open Housing Project is a radically different way to situate ourselves in a world where global capital flows and speculation are the dominant drivers for housing matters. The project is the response to economics, sustainability, demographics, and radically changing lifestyles in a city as diverse and emergent as Berlin.

105

The lives of people will be more turned outward, not just as part of a nuclear family but of a bigger community.

rent out their homes?

The Incomplete Open Housing Project aims at breaking down the closed Plattenbau blocks from the inside. The initial transformation started from the hypothesis: â&#x20AC;&#x153;What if residents of a Plattenbau could rent out their homes?â&#x20AC;? Each step of the transformation would be triggered by social behavior: the growth, shrinkage, or replacement of the existing family structure.

Incomplete Open Housing Manifesto

106

What if residents of a Plattenbau could

107

Nan Liu

Typical Plattenbau building

First layer of extension

A step-by-step strategy for transforming a Plattenbau.

Regular infrastructure grid

Second layer of extension

Extension Phase I â&#x20AC;&#x201D;four years

Extension Phase IIâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;seven years

Incomplete Open Housing Manifesto

108

Existing Plattenbau

109

Nan Liu Extension Phases

Ten Years Later Extension Phase 3 Total Rent: 造248,400 Construction Cost: 造247,000

Ph au

tte

la gP

n sti

i Ex 1

Ph 2

i Ex au nb

tte

la gP

n sti

Existing Plattenbau

A new circulation system serves both the existing families and the extended units. All communal spaces are attached to this system, offering different groups more possibilities to mix together.

Communal Library

Communal Kitchen

Workshop

Communal Living Room

Incomplete Open Housing Manifesto

112 Master plan and indicators. Before: Total land area: 48,919.32 square meters, total construction area: 75,253.50 square meters, housing area: 73,382.50 square meters, number of units: 984, housing plus (kindergarten): 1,881 square meters, FAR: 1.41.

After: Total land area: 48,919.32 square meters, total construction area: 136,657.10 square meters, housing area: 107,785.10 square meters, number of units 1,497, housing plus (public facilities): 27,090 square meters, FAR: 2.97.

113

Nan Liu Above: A typical studio unit is 5.4 x 3.6 meters (19 square meters).

Following spread: The current condition of the Plattenbau blocks along the Karl-Marx-Allee includes the long-time abandonment of courtyard space, the lack of public facilities, and the isolation of residential functions inside the buildings. Based on this situation, the Incomplete Open Housing Project created a new public system within the Plattenbau blocks to supplement the existing facilities, including a new grouping of a vertical gym, library, movie theater, and supermarket.

116

The Threshold Must Be Active, Never Passive

Christopher Soohoo

2 A passive threshold divides space. Nothing more, nothing less. 3 An active threshold claims a space beyond the edge it defines. It generates a liminal space that transforms use and atmosphere. 4 These liminal spaces exist within a gradient of states between interior and exterior, public and private, and individual and collective. 5 This gradient is a coarse mediator of extremes, meeting the needs for both the radical and the banal within a single spatial framework. It is not an artificial smoothness. 6 Within the gradient, the elemental threshold is at once dissolved and active. It is multiplied, scaled, and displaced as the primary generator of scaled, sequential space. 7 Dwelling within the open gradient reveals new ways of living, through the negotiation of extremes in lifestyle and atmospheres. 8 Atmospheres span extremes from warm to cool, dark to light, humid to dry, or light to dark where use and occupation are based on individual desire and pursuit of comfort. 9 The gradient is both flexible in its adaptability and pure in its formâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;it is both a solution and a generator.

117

1 The threshold must be active, never passive. It must be a generator of space, not a signifier.

Interior The Threshold Must Be Active, Never Passive

118

Topographic 119

Christopher Soohoo

The Threshold Must Be Active, Never Passive

120

This disparity between existing conditions and historical ambitions at Karl-Marx-Allee is the primary instigator of a proposal for the insertion of a new housing typology densifying the existing open space between the Plattenbau. Rooted in the preceding manifesto, this typology challenges existing dwelling habits that are exemplified by analysis of the existing Plattenbau units. Through aggregation of a single gradient unit, a multitude of spatial configurations for dwelling and mixed use produce a radical flexibility for programmatic adaptation, growth, and public urban space. This proposal densifies the existing open space at Karl-Marx-Allee with new dwelling units and public amenities that benefit both new and existing residents. The gradient unit is produced through a literal expansion of threshold. The resulting form dissolves the space of the grid by eroding the corners of a 3.6 by 3.6-meter grid based on the existing structural grid of the Plattenbau. The gradient space is specified through a range of atmospheres and spatial configurations based upon program and dwelling preferences, generating a new form of communal dwelling.

121

Christopher Soohoo Above: View to open topography and lower level entry stair.

Below: Interior view from open gradient.

Gradient Interior

Two-Level Stack

Open Topography

Existing Plattenbau

The Threshold Must Be Active, Never Passive

124 Previous spread: Site plan showing densification of open space between existing Plattenbau at KarlMarx-Allee.

Above and following page: Model of stacked gradient unit.

125

Christopher Soohoo

Section study of unit aggregation.

The Threshold Must Be Active, Never Passive

126

127

Christopher Soohoo Axonometric of proposed aggregation showing the flexible program and plan layout according to atmospheric and privacy gradients.

128

Site 4: Option Lots

Option Lots, a term coined by Brandlhuber+, are residual urban sites within the existing historical fabric and the later added Plattenbau as well as the meeting point between two Plattenbauten, which were mostly built in the 1980s. For Berlinâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s 750th anniversary celebration in 1987, the GDR initiated the construction of Plattenbauten in empty plots in the district of Mitte. This leftover or void can be seen as a design possibility rather than a disturbing interruption needed to be hidden behind fake facades.

For more information, see: http://www.archplus.net/home/archiv/artikel/46,3600,1,0.html

129

130

Against Flexibility

Elizabeth Pipal

ent flexibility of life, this table stays, reminding us of what the room wants to be, even if that desire has been denied (which is fine). Any space is made more interesting by the trace of its intended use: An auditorium turned into a dining room, a sea of desks turned into a dance hall, a neoclassical football field turned into an Olympic ski slope. There is a beauty to things that are in the way. As our techno-world becomes more and more malleable, we must not forget the importance of resistance, of having something to push against. We rely on resistance to feel grounded. Our discipline thrives on it. Flexibility mutes our voices and will leave us with a million solutions that suck the joy out of our lives in space.

131

Flexibility is deadly. It renders the banal functions of life just that: a set of problems to be solved by a series of spatial formulae—like the Jetsons’ space-pill instead of a hot meal. We humans are already the squishy stuff of flexibility and invented architecture to satisfy our deep-rooted desires for solidity. Designing indecision into architecture negates its purpose. Flexibility has been part of the architectural discourse since at least Louis Sullivan. His flexibility was embedded in the open office plan. Though not as abhorrent as the moveable partition, this idea has given us cavernous interiors meant to host any and all functions but that are, in practice, useless. Or at least stiflingly depressing. I’m reminded of the party that our school hosted in a multipurpose hall, which wasn’t nearly as good as the one held in a converted prison. Things get worse when architecture starts to move. Walls, beds, ceilings—here, now there, now completely gone. A room with a moveable partition has no identity. It’s not even a room, it’s a purpose, a series of functions without form. We often see moving architecture in artistic programs such as museums and theaters, which attempt to mute the architecture in favor of the art being exhibited. Renzo Piano’s gallery addition to the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum and OMA’s Wyly Theatre are excellent examples. Their flexibility mutes any relationship that they could have with the artwork exhibited within them. Is this really the role we want our buildings to play? Think of the fixed table in Maison la Roche. Its permanence gives the architecture a voice, even through time and programmatic change. The table stays where it is, but may change from a place for a vase to a place to do homework to a place to shoot a porn film. And amid the inher-

Against Flexibility

132 A selection of the Mitte gaps.

133

Elizabeth Pipal All gaps are expressed to the street, regardless of their accessibility, as an index of the new superstructure.

Against Flexibility

134 Gaps suitable for egress.

135

Elizabeth Pipal

BUILDABLE VOLUM

Buildable volume.

Section typology.

Against Flexibility

136

137

Elizabeth Pipal

(4) Roof used as a public park

(1) Datum for Berlinâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Mitte district changed from 22 meters to 26 meters.

(2) Empty gaps between buildings are used for vertical circulation.

(3) Gap circulation lands in a common room serving units within a 35-meter radius.

(5) Construction is primarily timber. The facade opens up surrounding common areas.

142

Contributors

Frank Barkow Frank Barkow studied architecture at Montana State University and the Harvard University Graduate School of Design. He has recently taught at the Royal College of Art in London, Cornell University, the EPFL in Lausanne, and at Harvard GSD. In 1993 Frank Barkow and Regine Leibinger founded their practice in Berlin. Their interdisciplinary, discursive attitude allows their work to expand and respond to advancing knowledge and technology. This know-how contributes to various projects including a gatehouse and factory-campus event space in Ditzingen, Germany, and the TRUTEC Office Building in Seoul. Barkow Leibingerâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s work has been shown at the Venice Architecture Biennale in 2008 and 2014, and at the Marrakech Biennale in 2012, and is included in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and the Deutsches Architektur Museum, Frankfurt.

Arno Brandlhuber is the founder of brandlhuber+, a collaborative practice with Markus Emde and Thomas Burlon, based in Berlin since 2006. Since 2003, he has held the Chair of Architecture and Urban Research at the Academy of Fine Arts, Nuremberg, and directed the nomadic masters program. He is cofounder of the public seminar Akademie c/o, currently researching the spatial production of the Berlin Republic. Among his better-known buildings are the Neanderthal Museum (DĂźsseldorf/ Mettmann 1996), the Haus Brunnenstrasse 9 (Berlin 2009), and Antivilla (Krampnitz 2014). Brandlhuber, together with Florian Hertweck and Thomas Mayfried, authored a recently released book on Berlin entitled The Dialogic City: Berlin wird Berlin.

Fritz Neumeyer studied architecture and holds a doctorate from the Technische Universität Berlin, where he held the Chair in the Theory of Architecture from 1993 until 2012. From 1989 until 1992, he held the Chair in the History of Architecture at the University of Dortmund. In 1992 he was the John Labatoot Professor at Princeton University. Neumeyer was a visiting professor at the Southern California Institute of Architecture; the Graduate School of Design, Harvard University; the School of Architecture, Katolieke Universiteit Leuven; Institut d´Humanitats de Barcelona; and the Universidad de Navarra. His recent books include: Der Klang der Steine. Nietzsches Architekturen (2001); Quellentexte zur Architekturtheorie (2002); and Hans Kollhoff. Das architektonische Argument. Texte und Interviews (2010).

143

Niklas Maak is a writer, arts editor of Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, and architecture theoretician working in Berlin. He was a visiting professor in the history and theory of architecture at Städel Schule, Frankfurt, and has taught and lectured at the Universities of Basel, Berlin, and Buenos Aires. In 2013, he codesigned and programmed, together with A77 and Pedro Gadanho of New York’s Museum of Modern Art, an experimental, temporary, minimal collective dwelling structure, the Colony at MoMA PS1, in Queens. In 2014, he worked with Rem Koolhaas’s Venice Bienniale team as a consultant and contributor. For his essays, Maak has been awarded the George F. Kennan Prize (2009), the Henri Nannen Prize (2012), and the COR Prize for architectural critique (2014).

Colophon

Poor but Sexy: Berlin, The New Communal Studio Instructors Frank Barkow, Arno Brandlhuber Seminar Instructors Niklas Maak, Fritz Neumeyer Teaching Assistant Maria Hudl Report Editor and Designer Maria Hudl Editorial Support Melissa Vaughn, Travis Dagenais, Sara Gothard A Harvard University Graduate School of Design Publication Dean and Alexander and Victoria Wiley Professor of Design Mohsen Mostafavi Editor in Chief Jennifer Sigler Publications Coordinator Meghan Sandberg

Acknowledgments The authors would like to thank Mohsen Mostafavi and the staff of the Harvard Graduate School of Design for their support. Thanks to Yona Friedman, Renée Gailhoustet, Claude Parent, and the office Lacaton & Vassal for their hospitality during the Paris trip, and to the visiting studio critics including Rem Koolhaas, Thomas Demand, and Matthias Sauerbruch. Additional thanks to Arch+ for featuring the conference “Legislating Architecture” and to Rainer Hehl from Technical University Berlin for his help with the organization. Thank you to Dörte Hanisch for being so accommodating throughout the semester, to Christopher Roth for the film portrait of the studio, and to Something Fantastic. Image Credits Page 67: from Berlin Wonderland: Wild Years Revisited 1990–1996., ed. Anke Fesel and Chris Keller (Berlin: Gestalten, 2014).

Series design by Laura Grey and Zak Jensen ISBN 978-1-934510-55-1 Copyright © 2016, President and Fellows of Harvard College. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without prior written permission from the Harvard University Graduate School of Design.

The editors have attempted to acknowledge all sources of images used and apologize for any errors or omissions. Harvard University Graduate School of Design 48 Quincy Street Cambridge, MA 02138 publications@gsd.harvard.edu gsd.harvard.edu

Studio Report Spring 2015

Harvard GSD Department of Architecture

Students Oliver Bucklin, Julian Funk, Nan Liu, Shiqing Liu, Gregory Logan, Giancarlo Montano, Nancy Nichols, Elizabeth Pipal, Christopher Soohoo, Dana Wu