Viewed from a distance - from the Berlin Ringbahn or from the city highway - the new building merges with its previously solitary neighboring building by architect Jürgen Sawade to form a striking ensemble. The new hotel and office building is designed as an architectural sister building to the "Platinum" office tower. As a complementary developed figure, it takes up the cascading of the neighboring building and reverses its movement from the outside to the inside, so to speak. The structure forms two symmetrical high points, one to the north on Werdauer Weg and one to the south. From a common five-storey base, they each rise in two-storey steps to a height of eleven storeys - in analogy to the "Platinum" building. The new building embeds the previously out-of-context building from the 1990s retroactively into the urban fabric. Together, the two buildings form an urban ensemble whose lenticular ground plan mirrors the structure of the neighboring urban development area of the "Schöneberger Linse".

With its west-facing silhouette, the building frees the adjacent Neue Zwölf-Apostel-Kirchhof with the listed chapel by Paul Egeling from its backyard situation and gives it new urban significance. The uniformly light-colored brickwork façade reinforces the sculptural character of the new building. With its cream-beige color scheme, it references the granite of the "Platinum" building. At the same time, its materiality echoes the brick of the neighboring monument. The windows are evenly distributed across the surface, creating an abstract façade image as a web of vertical and horizontal lines. The plasticity of the building envelope, conceived as a relief, develops from the detail. Window openings cut deep into the wall lend the façade a depth that creates a changing interplay of light and shadow. The two users of the new building benefit from the well-connected location between two central train stations: Debeka Berlin's regional office has moved into the southern part, while the northern part houses a hotel with almost 300 rooms.

www.maxdudler.de

Photos:

Stefan Josef Müller
www.stefanjosefmueller.de

(Published in CUBE Berlin 04|21)