Sustainable architecture means creating possibilities.
For our office location in Berlin, we have transformed an old piano factory in Berlin-Mitte into a residential and office building, giving it a new lease on life.
In doing so, our goal was to intensify the existing qualities while also meeting contemporary demands for living and working.
The goal of the "Hefe-Galery" project is the redevelopment of an inner-city brownfield site, whose previous use as a brewery became obsolete with the demolition of the building.
The new building compensates for the deficit in event and dining spaces. The differentiation of the retail structure attracts new external customer traffic, thereby strengthening Werl's inner-city retail landscape beyond just the immediate location.
The limited land resource has been occupied by a two-story building that aligns with the local scale. Retail, dining, logistics, and administration are located on the ground floor, with parking and technical facilities on the upper floor, as well as event spaces on both levels. Green areas are incorporated into the rooftop.
The primary structural framework consists of a prefabricated reinforced concrete construction with spans of 10x10 meters on the ground floor and 20x30 meters on the upper floor. After completion of the second construction phase, the usable area will be approximately 12,000 m².
The building features a central control system for optimized resource management. Rainwater is collected decentrally, stored centrally in a cistern, and then directed into a greywater system. High visitor traffic is managed through a complex supply and disposal concept that takes into account day and night cycles to minimize impact on the surrounding neighborhood.
Ningbo, located about 200 km south of Shanghai, is historically shaped by Chinese tradition, British colonial rule, and recent engagement with the political West. The urban traces of this history are evident in the juxtaposition of different building typologies.
Our client, the leading privately organized company for educational materials in China and a private school operator, requires a new headquarters. The project involves 10,000 square meters of office space and 25,000 square meters of retail space, to be developed at the intersection of the colonial city edge and contemporary Chinese urban development of the past twenty years.
The corporate culture focuses on traditional values and natural resources. Consequently, we proposed a building with a rational structural system and flexible floor plan organization. The façade is an artificial representation of a stone or rock, reflecting the company’s culture. It is constructed from pigmented reinforced concrete and features box windows inserted at regular intervals.
The energy concept integrates geothermal and waste heat from the shopping center in the three podium levels, as well as from the office floors, combined with component activation. This approach allows for a single-layer concrete skin with minimal weight, simplifying connection points. As a result, the extension of multi-story façade sections beyond the regular façade plane is easily achievable.
Giving a young company a distinctive identity and connecting corporate identity with the genius loci was the challenge of the FRIZ service and shopping centers.
Three markets in three very different peripheral locations of East German cities, three distinct individualities forming a unique corporate identity, shaped by the architecture and the unconventional, bold "FRIZ" logo.
With minimal material usage and construction weight, the trusses effortlessly achieve large spans thanks to the use of multiple folded and cold-rolled steel sheets. Stabilized with steel cables and left unclad, supported by a few slender steel columns, they stretch over flexible and transparent retail spaces. Despite their multifunctional division into shop-in-shop units, these spaces are experienced as a continuous spatial flow.
Connections to the urban space are established through large-scale glazing and modular aluminum facades, whose surfaces feature a lively internal structure and shifting shadow relief that integrate into the sharp building silhouettes.
No repetition of banal unoriginality, no artificial postmodern camouflage, but rather a minimized and modular construction of compact building forms that translate different service offerings and local contexts into striking architectural designs.
As confident, standalone organizing elements, the FRIZ service centers inscribe themselves into the disparate, fragmented edges of the cities—so successfully that additional projects for the company's expansion and its architectural corporate identity are already in progress.
