Scope
With the rising of ”The Digital Age”, concepts as Augmented Reality, Virtual Reality, MUDs, SMS, and Virtual Space have changed the way we interact in our cities. We no longer communicate
and meet in the way we did before. Digital communication tie our city together instead of physical infrastructure, plazas, and parks. The city has become an accumulation of simultaneous experiences, stages, styles, and cultures – a generic entity, where the individuals
coexist without being in direct physical contact with each other. Nevertheless, with one thing in common, people use the city for residence, production, service, and leisure – and as a part of their identity.
The challenge is to design the space for how people interact in the different modes: residence, production, service, and leisure. This project will focus on designing the space, where people meet in their leisure time. It has gradually changed from being a passive space, where the social interaction was the most important, into an active space containing some kind of entertainment. When we meet, it has to be in a unique, eventful environment – with some kind of cultural experience, like in a theatre, a concert hall, or an art gallery. Our quest for experiences has brought along a new economy based on events.
The cultural institutions have become major players in this economy, as nodes in the city. They work as catalysts in the development of neighbourhoods. In a global scale, cultural institutions like Guggenheim and the Sydney Opera House have acted as nodes in branding and attracting tourists to the cities of Bilbao and Sydney. In a regional scale, every city has its own nodes that attract people from outside the city to a certain event. Some provisional nodes spread around the city, while old institutions
like theatres and opera houses are often located in small clusters around a city centre.
The transformation of the temporary nodes is rapid. They are presently exiting because of their freshness and alternative concepts. However, you often see organizers of an event move it across the city in order to keep it fresh. If they cannot stay up to date and on the beat, they will lose their audience.
The velocity of space has changed. The way we meet no longer presuppose a physical space – the meeting place can be virtual across time zones, languages, and other cultural barriers. The time factor is more important, than where the meeting takes place. Everything is moving faster and seems more chaotic.
Architects have an obligation to focus on the physical and tangible, and recapture the entity of space from its virtual counterpart. Physical architecture’s strength is the ability to offer a real social interaction between people. Accentuating
this ability by mixing different functions
both programmatically and visually will increase the quality of the space, and help promote
the building in the ever more complex stream of information. In this context, virtual space can help design the building, by simulating
the final physical architecture. However, it is important that the physical building, and not the virtual simulation, is the final product.
The focus of this project is to design a building, which will hold different kinds of entertainment
together with supporting functions as bars, cafés, and nightclubs. The functions will have a symbiotic relationship, which will give the building an altogether higher spatial value than the sum of its parts. A spatial quality will emerge that is able to compete with virtual space as a place for social interaction.
Site
The site is located on the former “Mauerstreifen”,
a wasteland, which was part of the former military zone of the Berlin Wall. The place is an area of approximately three hectares
consisting of four separate undeveloped sites, separated by physical infrastructure. It is adjacent to the Federal Mint and just up the street, you find the Fisherinsel, which marks the border between Mitte and Kreuzberg. The site is near the city centre and the area of the new government buildings. Because of land disputes, the plots are still vacant. However, people do not consider it as public space because of the fences that surrounds most of the plots. Locating the Event Centre in this area will bring a new identity to the neighbourhood.
It will be a rallying point in a fragmented part of Berlin where “The Wall” for several decades separated the neighbourhood into two city districts.
Project
The Event Centre consists of an organic foyer containing supporting functions like bars, cafés, and lounges working as the main infrastructure
in the building. The organic form, animated from video shot on the spot, end up being a dynamic architecture capable of containing
a mixture of functions visually linked across the foyer.
The main functions (Art Gallery, Theatres, Concert
Halls, Cinemas, and EXPO area) are located between the different parts of the foyer. This is a more static, angular architecture based on the local directions of the site and the directions
of the two different city grids meeting here. It is architecture suitable for containing expressive functions, where the focus is on cultural events and not the building itself.
The construction of The Event Centre will take place in several stages. The foyer area is the infrastructure
that connects the different cultural institutions. However, it is a planning strategy, meaning that the foyer in the northern part of the building might not be similar to the foyer in the southern part. This project focuses on designing a part of the Event Centre, while other architects design the remaining parts, in order to achieve as large a variety of spatial quality as possible.
When you enter the Event Centre from the street, you enter a large vertical organic foyer, where you have visual contact to many different
functions and people that are not part of why you came in the first place. For instance, if you come to the Event Centre to see a film, you are in the foyer waiting along people going to the theatre or a concert. At the same time, a few floors up you can see people watching the new exhibition in the gallery that some places become part of the foyer.
As you go further into the building, you can sense the organic architecture as part of the internal
infrastructure. Because you most places walk alongside an organic element, the space still has a human scale though it is a large vertical
foyer. Other people will be visible on other floors crossing your path with other objectives.
When you enter the cinema, you will be crossing the border between the organic and the angular. Coming from an organic, dynamic architecture, where everything is in motion into a static architecture, where everybody is sitting still watching the motion on-screen.
The Event Centre is a node in the centre of Berlin – a building that will provide this abandoned area with a new identity. An iconic building on this site will change the Citizens of Berlin’s perspective on the area. The location near the city centre and the new government buildings will combined with the spatial quality
of the Event Centre bring further capital to the area. This will help upgrade the neighbourhood
to a level that is in agreement with its location.
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