During the planning of the Beisheim Center between Tiergarten and Potsdamer Platz, a 26.5-metre-wide plot of land was "left", because the neighbouring hotel was large enough. A pure office building was to be built here with nine floors above two shops on the ground floor, a slim, 35-metre-high high-rise.
The challenge was not the floor plan - a 26.5 by 14.5 square metre area with an access core at the back, which was to be usable as an open-plan, cellular or combined office - but the "face" of the building, its façade. It forms a building block in the street wall, a part of the whole and at the same time a self-contained unit. It is a classic three-part façade, which is built up of a plinth, a shaft and a far projecting roof overhang, symmetrical in itself, the outer wall sections reinforced by a little. The window structure is strict, because all windows have the same slim format and the same distance from each other. They lie deep behind the façade.
But the austerity is softened: the material, Verde Salvan, a greenish conglomerate rock, makes the picture varied without being obtrusive. And finally, there are the ornamental railing elements of the windows, which can be derived from an ivy plant, cast in aluminum like silhouettes, a finely pierced structure behind the hard wall and interweaving with it.
[Source: Modersohn & Freiesleben] (https://mofrei.de/bauten/projektdetail/projektdetail/96/)
Photos: Modersohn & Freiesleben
