A twelve-metre-narrow gorge between two sixty-metre-long fire walls is to be developed with an eight-storey residential and commercial building. It is one of the Edison farms that bear its name, as it was here, in the block between Schlegelstrasse, Chausseestrasse and Invalidenstrasse, that the first factory of the German Edison Company, predecessor of AEG, was located at the end of the 19th century.
The building consists of a front house, garden house and a single-storey side wing, a side passage leads to the commercial buildings inside the block. The ground floor and first floor accommodate commercial premises, above which there are 23 apartments.
Facing the street, the house presents itself with a symmetrical façade. Above the two-storey base on the scale of the neighbouring residential and commercial buildings of the Wilhelminian period, a bay window, bordered by two narrow strips of wall, cantilevers in front of the street line.
Maximum size French windows for the living rooms and equally large, upright windows for the kitchen with dining area allow optimum light into the deep rooms on the one hand and views of the busy street on the other. With their formats, they support the verticality of the building.
The façade material used is building ceramic tiles/brick slips in normal format. They are glued to 16cm of thermal insulation and do not imitate masonry, but in their combination with the windows, implied cornices and accents through glazes leave no doubt about what they are, a façade cladding, a dress.
While the upper floors of the courtyard facades are plastered, the brick lining continues along the passageway on the ground floor to the rear of the garden house, giving it the character of a main façade inside the block.
The apartments in the front building open to the courtyard via balconies. At the garden house, in which maisonettes are located, the balconies are spread over every second floor and become loggias, the different sizes of which are defined by spacing areas. The fact that a serene façade image is nevertheless created is the art and the challenge of such a building task in the existing building.
The "crowning" end of the front and rear buildings is a large attic apartment, whose outer walls are staggered behind the fronts and glazed.
Source: Modersohn & Freiesleben
Photos: Modersohn & Freiesleben
