ARCH_500-600 Options Studio: ‘Ultimate Openness’

Openness is the critical spatial feature of contemporary cultural facilities. This invoked, all-inclusive, open public space devoted to the community is the contemporary stage for social gathering, a platform for experimentation, and ultimately, the ideal environment for creative performance and social progress.

The notion of “openness” in architecture was examined as an essential condition for cultural development. The site was located in Berlin, a city with a rich sociopolitical setting in recent history and a place of high social diversity that offers a significant selection of architectural. The subject of the studio was a recently protected building, the Oberstufen-Schulzentrum Berlin-Wedding (Pysall-Jensen-Stahrenberg, 1977), located within the former West Berlin neighborhood of Brunnenviertel (formerly isolated by infrastructures and the Berlin Wall), which is currently undergoing an intense social debate about its potential community use.

The studio addressed two main themes: first, how to manage the preservation of an extremely recent example of architecture, and second, how to expand the building toward the neighborhood so it can succeed as a public facility. Students confronted a recurring topic about the history and preservation of neglected and politically incorrect buildings that is connected to, for example, controversial local episodes like the demolition of the Palast der Republik and the subsequent reconstruction of the Berliner Schloss (today Humboldt Forum). They also considered inspirational examples of architectural preservation from the same decade (1970s), such as the technologically built utopias of Ludwig Leo (the DLRG building, the Umlauftank 2). Attention was not only focused on the physical adaptation of an existing building for present-day purposes, but also on how to update the architectural symbolic level in order to properly represent an organization, institution, or community—an architectural design topic that is commonly avoided and ignored.

The compendium of student work developed during the course represents an interesting constellation of possible interventions and opportunities for how an existing architectural infrastructure can become a place for the community