Choriner Straße, a quiet residential street on the slope of Berlin's glacial valley, is located in a popular Berlin old building district between the city center and Prenzlauer Berg. Since the 1870s, there have been apartment buildings with flat neo-Renaissance façades, only the plot with the number 79 was never built on.
With 32 m of street frontage, the property is almost twice as wide as the neighboring plots. The new building fills this gap in the form of a perimeter block development with short side wings. The street-facing façade is based on the eaves height, scale and proportions of the neighbouring houses, but sets its own accent with two bay windows, a natural stone base and narrow natural stone cornices. The residential building opens up to the light, green interior of the block with spacious loggias and balconies.
The six-storey new building contains 23 apartments with 2, 3 or 4 rooms, which are accessed via two stairwells with elevators. The floor plan typology combines the advantages of Berlin's old apartments of the period around 1900 with the improvements in modern housing construction of the 1920s. From Berlin's apartment buildings, it takes over the combination of a larger and representative room clearly defined as living space with a number of equivalent rooms. As with the residential buildings of classical modernism, the stairwells are moved to the street side. In this way, the living rooms are reserved for their preferred location towards the garden, to which they open with floor-to-ceiling balconies or room-sized loggias. In the apartments with side wings, the living room occupies the traditional place of the "Berlin Room" with a shady, angled zone and a light-flooded, double-sided illuminated part.
A special feature are the two ground floor apartments, which are accessed via the courtyard, have their own garden and are therefore particularly suitable for families. They are barrier-free, as are the apartments on the 1st floor.
The apartment building is constructed in bulkhead construction, so the outer walls are not load-bearing. They were built from highly insulating pore bricks and clad with solid-coloured, mineral plaster.
[Source: Modersohn & Freiesleben] (https://mofrei.de/bauten/projektdetail/projektdetail/101/)
Photos: Stefan Josef Müller, Modersohn & Freiesleben
