The fundamental urban and building concepts of the competition were developed and enhanced during the design and construction period.

The new ensemble responds as much to the Baroque logic of the street plan as it does to the rules of 19th-century urbanism. Further, it absorbs the object-like quality of the existing office tower from the 1950s and registers the confrontational space that had developed between the highrises on either side of the Berlin Wall. In this combination of the disparate spatial configurations of consecutive generations, the new high-rise slab is the element associated with the present and the future.

The challenge presented by this project combines a concern for the workplace in the city with a commitment to an architecture that uses the resources of the (natural and constructed) environment economically. A low-energy building emerged, which not only offers an exemplary working environment in its passive control of energy consumption, but also aims to improve the immediate well-being of its inhabitants through an architecture in which the value of sensuous space is rediscovered.

At the same time the ensemble, developed from the tradition of the place, manifests the concerns and engagement of a new generation of architecture.