Description

The barns of Brandenburg are much more than the haylofts one might imagine; they are mighty, respectable brick buildings with narrow ventilation slits or openings, frequently covered, when still intact, with a slate roof. They stand shoulder-to-shoulder at the back of the plots and are frequently larger than the decoratively-stuccoed Prussian houses of their owners.

Päwesin is a village of such barns, just half an hour from the city limits of Berlin but beyond the wind parks and outlet centres of the outlying suburbs. In the 19th century, the Havelland region was a brickmaking heartland serving Berlin, and only surplus and substandard goods were used on site. The streets and courtyards are paved with brick: yellow-red fired bricks as far as the eye can see.

The barn has space enough for the range of residents who jointly use it. The empty shell (22 × 10 × 10 m) with its dark interior and earth floors 1.5 metres below ground on either side of the passage provided ideal conditions to be filled with new life. The distribution of functions was quickly develeoped: the painter’s studio on the right of the entrance, the architecture office and holiday apartment on the left, and the residential studio under the roof. The former passageway through the building was enclosed entirely by the flanking internal facades and the ceiling to the floor above and serves as a space for communal use in summer, its old timber structure filled in with diagonal slats. The floor and barn doors have been left as they were.

Bromsky architects followed this same principle throughout the rest of the building, picking up and reinforcing the structure’s specific characteristics and leaving visible traces of its former existence and use. The open structure offers the flexibility of an industrial loft and at the same time its character resists being broken down into individual apartments. The first step was the demolition of a dovecote to create space for an opening to the courtyard for the office and a niche for the external staircase. The staircase is supported by the existing buildings: between the barn and stable runs a concrete beam on which three prefabricated concrete elements rest, the steps leading down around the walls.

This interplay of parts determines the entire construction of the barn: the new roof rests on the old brickwork and the ceiling to the roof space rests on the inner masonry leaf of perforated bricks. Together with the core insulation, some of the walls are 50 cm thick: the construction makes no attempt to hide the effort required to make the barn suitable for living in. The facade likewise expresses the interplay of parts: the irregular placement of the original windows to the yard has been retained while large new openings have been cut out of the walls with a masonry saw, their placement following the barn’s structural divisions with the windows shifted outwards to be nearly flush with the outside wall. The window frames have been painted a moss-grey colour, with the opening casements in brown-grey – colours that reflect the colour of the Havelland and its bricks.

The group of residents also decided among themselves that once the basic structure had been found and secured, each could then complete their own section as they saw fit. The result is three interiors, each with its own character: the painter’s studio is one large space with a height of 5.50 metres, predominantly unbroken walls with a sleeping gallery and makeshift bathroom. The apartment and architect’s office opposite follow Adolf Loos’ concept of Raumplan, the different functions leading in and on to one another: the kitchen, office, bathroom, dining area and bedrooms are spread across seven different levels connected by stairs and ladders. Right at the top is an open hall beneath four mighty pre-assembled trusses with the bedrooms, kitchen and bathroom arranged at the gable ends. Its broad dormer becomes a kind of treehouse, facing outwards to the fir tree outside, whose branches can be reached from the balcony.

Originally published in Bauwelt 01-02.2016, pp. 36-39, abridged and edited for Building Types online, translated by Julian Reisenberger

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