Description

The site of the new building for the ARD Capital City Studio on the Spree – a stone’s throw from the Reichstag building and the Chancellery – is justified by television’s role in the control of information. In keeping with the times, the eighty radio and television journalists no longer work in “normal” cell-like offices, open-plan or group offices, but in private offices that are equipped with state-of-the-art digital production technology. The office has become a mini-studio. In these acoustically insulated rooms, the radio journalists do all the production for their stories themselves. In order to combat isolation, the architects designed a building that mediates between public activity and working in seclusion. The restaurant, the shops and the four-storey high entrance hall (the marketplace for news) on the ground floor are open to the public. From here, staff and guests access the five-storey editorial hall via a straight-flight stairway with raw concrete walls that leads up to the first floor. Wood-panelled wainscoting of the interior walls and metal fabric panels shimmering with gold rhythmise the hall irregularly and give the room an air of elegance. The longitudinally extended, light-flooded hall provides all manner of festivities with an appropriate setting and, as the ‘news exchange,’ forms the focus of the building. Steel footbridges and a cascade-like stairway give staff access to the adjoining offices lined up along the longer walls and provide an overview of the whole interior of the building. A cooling system integrated into the office walls and the double-glazed surface-mounted windows ensure a comfortable room climate and the necessary acoustic insulation in the studios. The horizontal division of functions with radio on the lower floors and television on the upper floors is reflected by the rhythm changes of the windows in the façade. The regularity of the fairfaced openings is broken at the head end: a corner window marks the position of the large television studio and gives a view of the Bundestag and the Chancellery. Above the entrance, an almost square ‘window’ three storeys high, lets light into the foyer.

The sharp-edged cube with its red concrete slab façade and façade perforations refers to the neighbouring institutional building erected under Kaiser Wilhelm.

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Originally published in: Rainer Hascher, Simone Jeska, Birgit Klauck, Office Buildings: A Design Manual, Birkhäuser, 2002.