Studio Neither Here Nor There, SoSe 26 Sophia Tang + Hans Christen Buhl Inspired by the theme “Love Letters to the City,” this project responds to a design studio brief investigating postwar modernist urbanism and its subsequent generations of mass housing. The studio strictly mandated the selection of an existing site within Berlin‘s Großwohnsiedlungen - specifically focusing on the rigid, prefabricated Plattenbau buildings of the GDR era. These iconic structures frequently prioritized structural optimization and idealized floor layouts over the social needs of human beings. In their drive to maximize production efficiency, these modernist developments often neglected or omitted the vital spaces required for spontaneous encounter, informal gathering, and collective civic life. The 1950s Q3A prefabricated concrete blocks typifies this historic shortcoming; while highly efficient structurally, its monolithic rigidity and blank end-walls create severe urban barriers that lack the integrated community infrastructure necessary to sustain a healthy neighborhood fabric
Q3A+ The Open Gable
The project functions as a critical urban conduit on Annenstraße, structurally and socially stitching together a neighborhood divided by a double street traffic corridor. By translocating the terminalstructural module of the Plattenbau, the ground floor is transformed into a permanently open, permeable public gateway.
This open threshold will align precisely with the pedestrian crossings flanking both sides of the site, establishing a continuous, uninhibited public spine. A resident moving from one side of the neighborhood to the other is naturally channeled through this civic portal, crossing the street, passing through the active non-profit cafe and open terrace, and exiting via the secondary crossing into the opposite sector. Through this spatial translocation, the Plattenbau ceases to be an urban barrier; instead, it becomes the vital connective tissue and social heart of the community.
Context
Located within Berlin’s post-war Heinrich-Heine-Viertel, the site faces a critical infrastructural challenge. Currently, Annenstraße already physically cuts the neighborhood into two separate, disconnected halves, a Western and an Eastern part, creating an immediate need for an urban reconnection.
In the future, this spatial fracture will be severely worsened by upcoming municipal densification plans. The introduction of a new road network will further separate the two sides, trapping an existing Q3A type building as a narrow, isolated architectural „island“ sitting directly between two active streets.
This transformation leaves the building‘s blank gable wall standing as an awkward visual dead-end and a massive physical barrier that deepens the divide between the two halves of the community.
Crucially, this plan also demands the demolition of the neighborhood‘s only existing café, stripping away the community‘s singular social anchor. It is precisely at this high-traffic hinge point, where a newly introduced civic bike path splits into a prominent bifurcation of dual transit pathes, that is where the intervention takes place.
The Living Mix: Four Neighborhood Characters
The architecture is programmed around the intersection of four distinct characters who represent the past, present, future, and imagination of the settlement. First is the longtime resident, who holds the local neighborhood memory; they need a safe, accessible space and find purpose by running the ground-floor community café. Second is the international student, who brings young energy and utilizes the upper shared lounges. Third is the wealthy, highly educated modern diverse couple, who activate the co-working spaces during the day. Fourth is the young, six-year-old curious kid, whose playground is the entire building. They explore every nook and cranny, discovering secret passages in the stairwells and turning the shared spaces into realms of fantastical play, a constant source of wonder and unexpected interactions. By bringing these different lives together under one roof, the project transforms from a simple housing block into an active, supportive, and endlessly surprising social hub.
Typology Profile: Q3A Typical Building
Q3A stands for Querwandtyp Nr. 3 Variante A (Cross-Wall Type No. 3, Variant A).
- Standard height of 5 floors (historically constructed without elevator shafts).
- A uniform, standardized depth of exactly 10 meters. - Regulated by a strict axial grid layout where a key transverse structural wall occurs every 3.6 meters.
- Designed as a multi-entrance sectional building (Spännerba u), where each individual staircase module directly serves 2 units (apartments) per floor.
Displaced Modules
By slicing open the historically blank end-wall «The Open Gable» and translocating the interior atmospheric volume of the terminal structural bay three modules outward, the building is transformed into an active civic gateway. The displaced volume stands as a translucent „Mirage“ of the original grid, serving as a social infrastructure and vertical service core, while the resulting open ground-floor terrace creates an uninhibited public path linking the West and East sectors of the community.
Drawings
Materials & Crowdsourcing
The material strategy directly reflects the project›s conceptual logic, transitioning from the heavy, unyielding permanence of the GDR monolith to a lightweight, user-driven architecture.
The Translocated Volume is wrapped in monolithic Polycarbonate sheets. It retains the precise structural geometry of the Plattenbau but acts as a „spatial ghost“, a translucent volume where the movement of stairs and the structure are softly visible to the street.
In contrast, the Connecting Terrace is an architecture of pure adaptability. It features vertical bi-fold panels that can be manually raised or lowered by the residents. Subverting the top-down uniformity of the original building, the infill of these screens is crowdsourced from the neighborhood itself.
By inviting residents to integrate their own textiles, linens, and fabrics into the frames, the terrace becomes a living, personalised, shifting, participatory façade, a colorful domestic tapestry that breathes and changes with the daily life of the community.
To cover the upper terrace, I introduced an undulating, light metal roof structure. The geometry draws direct inspiration from post-war German structural engineering, specifically the HP Schale, reinterpreting the classic hyperbolic paraboloid concrete thin-shell as a weightless, floating canopy.
