IT
Polish Embassy
competition
Berlin, GERMANY - 2013
Not a building but an urban context at the same time public, a manifesto of solidity and transparency. The building overlooks Unter Der Linden and is organised around the monumental square inside, with buildings and wings crowning it on all sides and screening the neighbouring buildings.
The concept is based on simple forms, with the building important, powerful and abstract. The presence of the courtyard gives the complex a candid, essential and metaphysical character, with a building facing the courtyard, intimate and changing in the light.
The envelopes of the buildings and the context offer different surfaces to the light and interact with each other. The context is represented by a high wall
Twenty-two metres (like the height of the roof), clad with grey stone, which also forms the entire paving of the courtyard, creates an abstract, theatrical backdrop to the complex of buildings.
The building on the street is covered with a brise-soleil of light grey stone which, like a semi-transparent cloak, filters, protects and makes the main façade vibrant, as well as its facing onto the inner courtyard. The skin vibrates with the natural light and with the light coming from inside, creating ever-changing effects. Suspended and jutting out from the main façade is a white stone surface into which openings and sunshades of the same stone are set.
The grey stone in two different shades, the light plaster, the burnished brass of the street front on the ground floor, tell a repertoire of traditional and timeless materials, the shape of the main building follows the profile of traditional architecture.
The composition sees the building on the street connecting to the other at the back through the classic concept of the courtyard, dedicated to intimacy, but also to celebration. The building facing the courtyard is clad with openable wooden sunshades and dialogues with the veil of water over which it appears suspended and with the natural garden that separates it from the boundaries of the lot.
The materials are interpreted according to modern cuts and workmanship, modelling forms
simple in an articulated context, the forms are solid, reliable, but they never seem to touch the ground. The forms are as if suspended, powerful materials that instead become an expression of lightness.
The courtyard is the inside of a large white box suspended between the grey stone floor and the sky, in which only the flagpole, the identity, stands out. We imagined it as a large, light structure, finished with white cement plaster on the outside.
At the bottom, containment and structural elements in corten create an abstract, geometric dance, like an artist’s garden.
