NEUE BAUAKADEMIE BERLIN - a club for the former & future architecture

My project is a contribution to the contemporary debate on the programmatical and architectural future of the Bauakademie in Berlin. Working on reconstruction is accompanied by a set of questions that expands typical design problems: All future design decision negotiates its justification with a building long gone but very prominent in mind.

Reconstructing difference — A negotiation of time in architecture\nThe term reconstruction implies the dialectic of two aspirations: the repetition of ‘something past’ and the creation of ‘something new’. A design-work under the subject of reconstruction always requires both. The task is to build a critical link between the previous and the nascent, between memory and vision. The process of design thereby becomes a balancing act between providing sameness and introducing new expressions. By identifying the sameness we simultaneously recognize the difference. \nThis work studies Schinkel’s ideas and visions and reinvents them in a playful way. I try to experiment with different methods to approach sameness instead of choosing one determining strategy. As a leading motive I refer to Schinkel’s generic pillar-vault-system and search for a contemporary construction method. In result I introduce an integral structure of wide spanning monolithic-ceilings — a composite of a grid-rib-vaults-system stacked upon each other. While the space in its dimensions, proportions, and shape create a fundamental sameness a clear difference can be perceived.\nA.club — Architecture for the use of architecture\nThe guiding theme of the Bauakademie in the past and in the future is architecture. The building performs as a didactic representative in the prominent surrounding in the center of Berlin. It should however not just become an architecture to visit, but an architecture to use. The 18th century London clubs serve as a programmatic archetype for this project. Clubs of such kind celebrate and embody architecture and incarnate the spatial translation of a social network. The proposed club for the been and the becoming architecture administers the leading subjects of the site and its surrounding: The constantly “becoming” city, the dialectic of reconstruction and the architecture itself. It titles itself with these issues and places them in a superimposition in the compact space of the New Bauakademie — as an assembly of a program between ‘previous’ and ‚nascent’.