Directly in the middle of Berlin the Residential District “The Garden” with owner-occupied as well as rented flats was completed in August 2016. Right across from the new headquarter of the German Secret Service a complex of buildings with 5 to 7 above-ground levels was built. 161 exquisite rented flats, 120 owner-occupied flats, 7 commercial units and 121 underground parking spaces find a place there now.

Spacious patios, cantilevered balconies as well as the wonderfully arranged city garden give “The Garden” its name. Calm courtyards and secluded, idyllic gardens provide greenery and create places of retreat. Plastic building structures and diverse intertwined facades shape the appearance of this superferent design.

The building complex was developed on Chausseestrasse, the oldest route between the center of Berlin and the district of Wedding, right where the former border area between West and East Berlin left a desolate, empty lot in the nineties. The concept for the site is based on forerunners from the nineteenth century. For example, Riehmer’s Hofgarten in the district of Kreuzberg and the Amelia Park in the district of Pankow are ensembles of magnificent residential buildings that cover a quarter or even half of an entire neighborhood, each with narrow pathways and green spaces that lead from one street to another.

The attractiveness of The Garden is rooted in a similar design. Rising eight stories at their full height, the front buildings with office spaces, commercial areas and apartments along Chausseestrasse form a gate. A walkway leads from the opening between the two flat-topped towers, pointing toward the neo-Gothic chapel of the cemetery of the Cathedral Parish and passing three small, green inner courtyards.

“The Garden” is a residential housing development in the heart of Berlin near the former inner-German border.Following the designated title of the development project, our design aims at fulfilling that promise and to create an actual garden for the forthcoming development. Underground parking infrastructure, provided an obstacle towards achieving a dense dissolving aesthetic of vegetation.

Taking the romantic garden as a conceptual starting point, the evolving cultivated wilderness alludes to a variety of classical garden elements but disperses them to a loose vegetation pattern of vividly growing bushes, shrubs and flowers combined with a pixel-like paving grid as informal way-system connecting the green.

Sunken trees and a great variety of perennial species were inserted into the partly sunny and shady recesses of the dense building complex atop the underground parking enabling the garden to grow naturally.

Cultivating the common form of the garden which acts as an antipode to the surrounding structural form, resulted in an updated contemporary layout.

In this sense, the green structures form a self-confident counterpart to the formal and large-scale new edifices and constitute a dynamic reference point within the otherwise clean urban context. 

Client: Garden Projektentwicklung GmbH, PeaksideFourS.á.r.l.