Description

Designing an extension to a tax office is not a task that would normally present one with some of the most delicate issues of one’s profession. Typically, it includes office space, some archives, all efficiently organised and connected to the existing building in a sensible fashion. One is unlikely to encounter experimental office forms as the tax office is not generally known as an employer willing to trial progressive workplace concepts.

The situation for the new building for the tax office in Oranienburg, designed by Wiewiorra Hopp Schwark Architekten from Berlin in a joint venture with the Dutch firm De Zwarte Hond, was different. The challenge was not how to organise the workspace; a good general standard was all that was required. The primary sticking point was the building that needed to be extended in which the main tax office resided. At first glance it looks like a harmless administrative building from the 1930s. In reality, however, it is the site of one of the most important, and largely still intact, administrative legacies of the National Socialist regime. Between 1938 and 1945, it was here that the SS authority for the “Inspection of Concentration Camps” had its headquarters, a short distance from the concentration camp at Sachsenhausen. From here, about one hundred SS officials masterminded the operation of the 32 main concentration camps and some 1000 sub-camps, issuing dress regulations, determining starvation rations, deciding on corporal punishment and death sentences, organising forced labour and mass murder. After 1945, the building was used by the National People’s Army of the GDR, and after reunification, the tax office moved in. In order not to completely trivialise its history as a building of Nazi perpetrators, the Brandenburg Memorial Foundation also took up residence there, but it was not until 2013 that an exhibition detailing the history of the building as an administrative centre of the concentration camps was opened. Also in 2013, the Brandenburg State Office for Real Estate and Construction announced a competition for the expansion of the tax office. The intention was to unite the employees, who had previously been spread across four locations, at the headquarters.

The German-Dutch team of architects decided to make the difficulty of dealing with the old building the theme of their design – by setting apart the new building in its design, placement and architecture in every way possible. It was this idea that won them first prize and the commissioned to build the extension. The tax office took up operation in the new building in 2018. The question now is whether the concept realised by Wiewiorra Hopp Schwark and De Zwarte Hond has been successful.

The new building presents itself as a completely freestanding structure that stands somewhat strangely next to the old building, connected only by an underground passage. The architects divided the required spaces into three wings of different lengths and widths, slightly rotated with respect to each other. In the alignment of the each of the three wings the architects took great care to avoid lining up with any structures, building or roads in the immediate surroundings, deliberately working against any reference to either the old building or to the Sachsenhausen Memorial and Museum less than two hundred metres away. Although the primary gesture of the building may initially have been motivated by an idealist or even moral desire on the part of the architects to differentiate the building from the former site of Nazi crimes, the strange positioning of the new building will almost certainly lead attentive passers-by and visitors to the tax office to notice that something is not right at this place. And in the best possible sense, this irritation will draw attention to the place and its history.

Originally published in Bauwelt 14.2018, pp. 40-45, abridged and edited for Building Types online, translated by Julian Reisenberger

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