Architecture in Siemensstadt: Continue building on the industrial monument

As past due as 1911, the architect Hans Poelzig became nonetheless questioning with regard to the manufacturing unit constructing “whether or not it is easy to or have to talk of architecture in any respect with this type of building”. Ten years later the problem was decided, you need to. Berlin had taken on a leading role internationally in commercial construction, with protagonists consisting of Hans Poelzig (Kabelwerke), Peter Behrens (AEG), Eugen Schmohl (Borsig, Ullstein), Otto Rudolph Salvisberg (Geyer Werke) and Hans Heinrich Müller (Bewag). And of direction with Hans Hertlein, who headed the Siemens production branch for four many years from 1912 to 1951.

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Hertlein designed homes all over the global for the electronics organisation. Above all, but, he fashioned Siemensstadt and, over several decades, drove the development of commercial construction together with his buildings. Initially attached to the fashion of the time with classicist overtones (important management, dynamo plant), he dedicated himself inside the 1920s to a radical, functionalist modernism, culminating in the Wernerwerk high-upward thrust constructing and Wernerwerk XV with their arrangements of unadorned cubes and serial, nearly monotonous fenestration.

With this radicalism, he marked the quit of the attempts to benefit a ultimate little bit of romanticism from industrial production thru architectural design, and the start of sober, lapidary industrial construction past decorative-layout aims, because it nevertheless prevails today .

Techno Campus Siemensstadt.

© Stefan Mueller

If Hertlein’s big homes alongside Siemensdamm and Nonnendammallee don’t radiate desolation and bloodless, that’s particularly due to the building cloth, the clinker brick facades and the lattice home windows. Hertlein’s influence on the economic structure of the Twenties and Nineteen Thirties through these big homes, celebrated in all exchange journals, can rarely be puffed up.

From this, but, grows their importance as cultural monuments and the duty to defend the top notch ensemble of Berlin commercial constructing tradition.

So if production is to take region in the immediately vicinity of Wernerwerk XV, the builder and architect have a sure responsibility to pay their respects. The customer, CCB II TechnoCampus Berlin GmbH, already operates Wernerwerk XV as an workplace building and has proven itself to have an “structure affinity”.

Sergei Tchoban (Tchoban Voss Architekten) is one of the busiest architects in Berlin. He doesn’t exactly belong to the representatives of traditionalist structure or “stone Berlin”, but he’s additionally not one of the glass fetishists. For him, building in the city method continuing to build on the texture of the city that has grown, on the picture of the metropolis.

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He did this in an exemplary way on Rosenthaler Strasse contrary Hackesche Höfe, wherein he replaced a faceless Sixties constructing with a building (Apple Store) that blends into the ancient street with its 3 individual facades clad in natural stone and brick. He attaches precise importance to the material effect and relief depth of the facades, which give the houses value and tectonic strength.

He proceeded no in a different way on Siemensdamm, wherein the intention was to unite new and vintage into one ensemble. With their dimensions and their clean cubatures, the two supplementary buildings correspond with the existing building. The two corners take the twice angled Hertlein constructing within the center and shape  open garden courtyards with it.

Muscular facades

And just like the Hertleinbau, the brand new buildings show an genuinely serial degree of the ground-to-ceiling home windows on all sides. But there are also variations that set them apart personally. For example, by dividing the storeys horizontally with concrete cornices. The pillars among the windows turn out to be narrower and lighter closer to the top and express the burden situations. In widespread, the more strongly reliefed facades appear greater muscular, greater tectonic. Solid brick become the best choice for the facades, however a lighter, leather-based-colored one.

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The floor floors are open to the general public with eating places and open terraces as well as rooms for health activities. All entrances are marked with the aid of double-storey gates in the otherwise uniform facades. Black pigmented concrete ceilings, patinated metal partitions and terrazzo flooring as well as three meter excessive elevator cabins deliver the entrance situation a positive stage. The office area is permit in gadgets of 350 rectangular meters or extra. The roofs are planted and made on hand to tenants.

The hundred-yr-antique Siemens homes with their clinker facades are still wonderfully preserved. The equal can be predicted from the congenial new homes of the Techno Campus, which form a own family with them and were built simply as solidly and durably.