Description

Street noise, train traffic, a constrained site: multiple adversities that a housing project in Berlin-Gesundbrunnen answers with a resolutely placed concrete cliff of a building. Behind its massive, prefabricated walls, however, its residents find peace and quiet.

In 2014, a group of private clients in the district of Berlin-Mitte acquired a leftover triangular sliver of land sandwiched between a busy freeway and several local and long-distance railway lines. At just 300 €/m², the purchase price was unbeatably low, but the question that without doubt had caused other before them to pass up the opportunity was how can one build a house here? The Berlin-based architecture practices of roedig.schop and sieglundalbert already had an answer ready and waiting on their hard drives. After they discovered the 2150 m² large plot of land in 2012, they decided to cooperate. Creating a trapezoidal floor plan, the planners traced the long side of the triangular plot of land and sliced off the ends, picking up the building line of the street to the side as well as the neighbouring residential row. Pushed right up to the northern edge of the site, the building acts like a six-storey soundproofing wall, shielding the noise of the trains from the garden area to the south. To lessen the impact of the street noise, a hilly border acts a screen to the road. The architects then set out with their project idea to find a group of clients to purchase the site as a collective. A core group quickly came together, followed soon after by the remainder of the 36 parties – families, couples, singles, academics and tradesmen.

The architects roedig.schop and sieglundalbert divided the work up between them, not according to work phases but floor by floor. Each office spoke to the residents and neighbours of an entire storey about their respective living preferences. While the basic floor plan layout is repeated, it leaves room for variations – be they additional walls, different entrance situations or the choice of parquet flooring.

The apartments range in size from 60 m² to 115 m² and on the plans look like narrow, longitudinal strips. In reality, however, they feel much more spacious, not just because the triangular glass balcony niches to the south look out onto the lush green hill of the Volkspark Humboldthain, but also because the long axes of the apartments, which run north-south, have up to 25 metre deep through-views. The narrow triangular tips, a product of the building’s trapezoidal shape, need some creative furnishing solutions, but this is precisely what sets the building apart from more usual floor plans and lends it its particular charm. The culmination of this are the pointed east-facing balconies: standing here, one looks down from the railing at the flow of traffic parting before one’s eyes as if gazing down from the bows of a ship.

The total cost (including the price of the land) was less than 2900 €/m², of which about 1900 € were the construction costs. Of particular note is that H6 is a prefabricated concrete slab construction, “albeit of a rather more individual kind than what we usually associate with a concrete prefab,” says the architect Christoph Roedig. Each storey was built in four to five days, the crane hoisting slab after slab into place. This concrete structure, made of core-insulated sandwich elements prefabricated by Allton, was necessary to create sufficient mass to counteract the vibrations and noise of the train traffic. The façade has a ribbed structure much loved by architects, as well as triple glazing mounted in steel frames (noise insulation class 4), which is so effective that when looking out, the trains appear to pass by silently like fish in an aquarium.

Originally published in Bauwelt 17.2018, pp. 22-25, abridged and edited for Building Types online, translated by Julian Reisenberger

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