Berlin: The Latest Architecture and News

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The Museum for Architectural Drawing presents Lebbeus Woods, ON-line, an exhibition of the finest works of architectural theorist, draftsman, educator and architect, Lebbeus Woods (1940–2012). Curated by his longtime friend and partner Christoph a. Kumpusch, the exhibition brings together a collection of Woods’ visionary works that have never been exhibited before. The intensely rendered architectural and urban environments produced early on in Woods’ career are exhibited together for the first time. These ink and pencil drawings cover a wide range of Woods’ research and re-imagination of cities both real and fictive and support Woods’ longstanding desire to show the capacity of architecture as a transformative and eloquent force.

Bonjour Tristesse is a social housing project designed by Portuguese Architect Álvaro Siza Vieira. Located in Berlin, the project was Siza’s first built work outside of his native country. Siza’s design offers a meaningful precedent in urban densification, demonstrating a delicate balance between contextual awareness, creative freedom, and progressive vision.

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GRAFT and Kleihues+Kleihues has teamed up with Genossenschaft für urbane Kreativität (Cooperative for urban Creativity) to realize a complex of five towers centered around working and living in Berlin, Germany. Titled “Eckwerk,” the new complex is set to rise within the confines of an existing viaduct, whose shape and materiality served as the project’s main source of inspiration.

J. Mayer H. has won an invited competition to design “Volt Berlin,” a new “shopping and urban experience” center near Berlin’s Alexanderplatz. The winning scheme offers a variety of experiential offerings, including multi-brand shopping, an indoor skydiving and event space, and a 7,500 square meter hotel, all within a single cubed complex whose organization is based off an uneven grid.

• Architects

  J. Mayer H. Architects

• Location

  Alexanderplatz, 10178 Berlin, Germany

• Photographs

  J. Mayer H.

• Area

  29500.0 m2

Only 5 more days on the exhibition 2D:3D, an installation by Barkow Leibinger at the BDA Berlin Gallery. Covering the wall surfaces of the small gallery space with “tapete” or wallpaper the façade of the storefront gallery frames what Leon Battista Alberti described as a fenestra aperta. In this configuration the space of the gallery is a projection/ extension of the streetscape in the bourgeois residential historical Mommsenstrasse neighborhood.

Playing with the concept directive 2D 3D, the wall paper on one side of the gallery is a two dimensional pattern: an organic looping structure which repeats and mirrors itself that is both ornamental and geometrically structural in its architectural implication. On axis with the street front façade at the back of the gallery is a wallpaper “portrait” of this system in black and white but now projected as a one-point perspective optically extending the perspective of the gallery itself.

A new series of international architecture competitions are characterizing a clear change in the current urban planning strategy of Moscow. The initiator of these developments is the incumbent chief architect of the Russian capital, Sergey Kuznetsov. Together with his team, he has breathed new life into Moscow’s urban development since taking office in mid 2012. The exhibition New Moscow – Новая Москва presents two international competitions – from the fields of landscape planning (1st prize Diller Scofidio + Renfro, New York) and cultural building (1st prize Heneghan Peng, Dublin) – and through these demonstrates the great gains for the city’s urban planning that are being drawn from this open, global approach.

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Berlin's Barkow Leibinger has won an invited competition to design a new hotel tower and conference centre as part of Berlin's largest hotel complex, the Estrel. Establishing a new gateway to the center of Berlin from Schönefeld International Airport, the tower will stand at 175 meters (578 feet) making it the tallest high-rise in Berlin to date. Located on the Sonnenalle at the intersection of the Ship Canal, S-Bahn and Autobahn, the site acts as a threshold between the heterogeneous industrial and residential periphery of the city and the historical neighborhoods of Neukölln.

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In a competition that ultimately crowned Frank Gehry as winner, Berlin’s Barkow Leibinger placed third with their 150-meter “faceted stacked building” proposal clad in glass. Aimed to be Berlin’s tallest building, the apartment and hotel tower is planned to be the city’s first high-rise residential development since the 1970s.

Studio Daniel Libeskind has released images of his latest project: a 10,000 square meter residential building planned for the center of Berlin. Occupying a half-acre corner site in the neighborhood of Chausseestrasse, “Chausseestrasse 43” will be encased by a metallic-coated ceramic facade shaped to maximize exposure to natural light.

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With the exhibition "The Poetics of Boxes" Aedes presents the first monographic show in Europe of the work of Mathias Klotz from Santiago de Chile, currently one of Chile’s most successful international architects.

Klotz’s works are characterised by their structural clarity. The distinct volumes and lines of his buildings correspond with perfect conceptual rigour to the landscape. In the exhibition this cosmopolitan from the Pacific presents his approaches and working methods. Alongside his work as an architect for over thirty years, Mathias Klotz is also active as filmmaker and photographer. So in a certain way his buildings can be understood as constructed screenplays. They tell the stories of the inhabitants and the surroundings. Klotz's stylistic devices are framed views, light and shadow, as well as a reduced palette of materials consisting mostly of timber and exposed concrete. Views into and out of the buildings provide a strong connection with the setting. The relationship between inside and outside is a very central theme in Klotz’s oeuvre.

Speaking at the opening, on September 13, will be Pritzker Prize jury member, Dr. h.c. Kristin Feireiss, Cristóbal Molina Baeza, Commissioner National Council for Culture and the Arts, Miquel Adriá, Director Arquine, and Mathias Klotz.

More information and images after the break.