ABOUT THIS PROJECT

Berlin is a dense, cosmopolitan city, yet it is a city largely defined by its historic courtyard buildings in the west, and Soviet-influenced housing blocks in the east. This project seeks to mediate between the two typologies through densification, whilst aiming at turning the focus of the project inwards, away from the street and concentrating the nexus of public/urban life underneath the mass of a series of high-rise towers. 

The site retains a typical street perimeter, yet the urban life embedded within is focused largely within a concourse of far grander scale, sectionally tied to the existing datum of its city surroundings. Here the public - in a truer sense of the word- is free to intermix with the local residents/working inhabitants who spend their days working and living above, and their nights engaging their neighbors below on the ground. A series of social programs (nodes) serve to introduce the city at large into the concourse, subverting the imposing face of the many high rises through a smaller scale of entry. Once within the system, a series of vertical cores and stairways serve to draw the public upwards, to fan out and occupy the rooftops of the horizontal mass of retail, fitness, and social buildings. 

Rendez-vous Point is a reaffirmation that the public will hesitate or resist entering within the vertical space of a tower, as it represents the crossing of a literal material and implied social boundary of security and privacy. This project seeks to work within this social construct to challenge the assumed tower/ plinth relationship and propose a new way of approaching the urban high-rise development to further the study of the “true public” space. I seek to generate a plan that is polycentric, favoring no clear entry point in relation to the city at large. In this approach, the public is free to exchange with the localized population of live and work in a loosely demarcated concourse, a space in which the traditional relationship between tower, plinth, and street-front is thrown into flux. Here, the inversion of opacity and transparency in wall types, relative to the rest of the site plan, produces a permeable and inviting space to escape the city, exchange with a localized population, and engage in programs that exist at a different frequency than those outside of the system, a series of node programs.