BERLIN MARCHLEWSKI
design: Petra Jablonická
consultant: Ing. arch. Martin Kusý
6. year / 1. semester
2019/2020
Current situation
We are located in the wider centre of Berlin, in the former Eastern Bloc, not far from the famous Karl-Marx Alle.
The plot is located in a part of the city with a fairly dense housing development, where the average height of these houses reaches 5 storeys. The houses are mostly built in the post-war period.
When we look from a bird's eye view, all we see on our plot is a dense tangle of trees. From the street we can only see the land surrounded by a high wall, but there are three buildings further on our plot. This is the former car service building, which currently serves as a studio for a sculptor and an architect. There is a shed attached to this building on the right hand side. It is the only functional building on our property. The other two buildings serve as warehouses but are in poor condition.
Task
In today's Berlin, the housing issue is very topical, so the constant increase in population requires an increase in the number of living spaces. At the same time, we are in a neighbourhood with a predominant housing function. Therefore, it was natural to address the topic of housing on our site as well.
The project is mainly focused on the design of a multifunctional house, enriched by the preservation, reconstruction and partial extension of the former car service building, where the function of the sculptor's and architect's studio remains, as they are also the investors of the project.
Idea
When one enters a property today, the first thing one realizes is the amount of greenery around the property, but also on it. The atmosphere is almost reminiscent of a secret garden, enriched by a brick fence. It is a kind of neglected, yet beautiful plot, where one has the feeling that one is not even in the centre of Berlin.
This atmosphere is something that I have largely tried to preserve and adapt to the overall design of the apartment building.
Proposal
I tried to minimize the footprint of the apartment building in order to preserve as much garden area as possible. I am creating a setback from the property edge in the northern portion and this is due to the tree line going over the wall from the street to our property. This offset also makes room for the main entrance to the apartments, as well as the studio and the escape staircase from the garage. The staircase and elevator to the apartment building is located to this northern section. The staircase is designed as an exterior staircase and the apartment building is conceived as a terraced pavilion house, where the south-facing pavilions also function as terraces. This connection between the pavilion and the terraces adds to the social value of the house, as physically it is one space and the private part of the terrace is only visually defined by the steel cables on which the terraces are suspended. By extending the staircase to the exterior and the glazing system allows us to use the space of the apartments freely and variably. The flats are formed in such a way as to create a mix of flats on each floor and therefore a mix of occupants.
The layout of the flats are designed so that each flat is floating and therefore everyone gets views of both atmospheres, street and garden.
All the surrounding buildings are characterised by the same features in the street façade, namely: precise grid, windows, dormers, piano nobile, highlighting the ground floor with a different surface material than the rest of the building, rhymes. Most of the adjacent buildings are rendered.
The design of the front, street façade of our building was conceived based on these elements in the neighborhood. The windows facing the street are in a precise grid based on the grid of the facades of the surrounding buildings. The dormers, created by inserting mass around the windows, visually accentuate and change the shape of the windows. The ground floor is higher than the other floors /piano nobile/, the finish of the ground floor is made of white plaster like the rest of the building, but the finish of this plaster is the so-called scratch plaster, while on the rest of the building a structured plaster is used. The size of the windows in the ground floor is larger than on the rest of the building, which gives a modern piano nobile effect while giving the building a full urban ground floor.
Corner windows are proposed on the northern corner, thanks to which a panoramic view of the street opens up. The west wall had to be designed as a gable due to zoning restrictions.
The south-western façade of the apartment building is entirely conceived to give the residents of the apartments the greatest possible experience of the garden. That is to say, the entire façade is glazed. Thanks to this, we also get a view of the garden from the street, where the windows of the front façade act as picture frames.
The extension of the background to the studio is also proposed, which has achieved a functional division of the plot. The northern part, mentioned above, serves as an entrance to the apartment building, but also to the studio. The remaining garden is separated from the apartment building by the extension and thus belongs entirely to the artists working in the studio, or it can also be accessed from the ground floor, which allows these two functions to be merged or expanded. The residents of the apartment building do not primarily have access to this part, but nevertheless benefit from its atmosphere thanks to the terraces facing it. However, the residents of the apartment building have access to the common terrace on the roof of the studio.
The retention of the brick wall circling the site was to preserve the atmosphere of the secret garden. The various perforations of this wall in some parts were about partially opening outwards, but at the same time allowing the viewer to peer into the courtyard only minimally and thus retaining its secretive expression.
