Edel Headquarters Berlin
Competition 1st Prize - Berlin, 2012
PROJECT
A building on the campus of the Arts Faculty in Berlin to be used as office, residence and gallery. It should be used for both producing and publishing art and music and has to be the embodiment of art itself. The intention of this draft is the creation of a spacial sculpture with a sublime touch, bold elegance, at the same time simple and easily remembered, yet complex and ambiguous.
URBAN CONSTRUCTION
The plot deserves to obtain a distinguishing urban feature at the end of the Arts Faculty campus, which serves both as an attraction and as a boundary to the place; as well as being a destination and an invitation to the campus. The construction window’s dimensions will be taken over and the predetermined height will be only slightly exceeded. A transformation of the volume, without augmenting the surface, into three objects oriented in different directions will give the building a face, pointing toward the place: The architecture presents itself and invites, it becomes a target and arouses longing. Even where the Invalidenstraße runs above the Spandauer ship canal, the urban feature is distinguishable. The ground floor takes up the construction area’s geometry, the three following floors of office take the visitor towards the campus whereas the two top floors for residential or office use are aligned with the canal: the building gets merged with the surroundings.
BUILDING STRUCTURE
Art is never unambiguous: this building is simple and at the same time complex, though never complicated. With few means – in this case: the intersections between the twisted objects – the architecture is no longer comprehensible at first sight: An attractive house, which wants to be examined repeatedly before it reveals itself. No feature exists for its own sake, the only things that matter are refinement and elegance! Above the ground floor and in front of the last two floors, four extensive terraces are formed. From the offices on the first floor one can step out in all four directions of the compass, allowing to have visual contact with the people on the campus. The apartments on the fourth floor have those same vast and highly attractive terraces with wide vision in all directions.
