Our first stop is the East Harbor area, Osthaven, as it is called in the German capital. This former port area, unlike its brother Westhafen, has never had a closed water area, but in fact was a quay stretching for one and a half kilometers, along which warehouse buildings and granaries have been preserved. In the early 2000s, the city decided to breathe new life into these objects, initiating the creation of a cultural and media cluster here, which was called Media Spree. A competition was held for his master plan, which nps tchoban voss won in 2003.
“The essence of our proposal was, first of all, to preserve the very scale of the previous development,” explains Sergei Tchoban. “In particular, the size and parameters of the newly built blocks on the embankment fully correspond to the neighboring historical buildings, and the distances between them allow residents of the second line districts to see the river.” After the master plan was approved, nps tchoban voss received several building plots in the Osthaven area.
The first building here for the bureau was the NHow hotel. Commissioned in 2011, he managed to collect a bunch of professional awards and be known as one of the most famous modern buildings in this part of Berlin. The complex consists of two seven-storey buildings facing the river, in terms of resembling the letters G and P, which are interconnected by a transparent lintel. The basement that connects them is completely glazed, while the buildings above are clad with clinker, and the architects used bricks of different thicknesses, giving the facades an expressive texture. The dynamic composition of the volume is also supported by square windows distributed along the facades emphatically asymmetrically, but the main "icon" of the hotel is the superstructure, which protrudes 21 meters beyond the boundaries of its base. Lined with metal, this console, as conceived by the architect, figuratively resembles a shipbuilding crane, paying tribute to the "port" origin of the building. Moreover, its side facades are dressed in brushed steel with that characteristic dull glow, which is so characteristic of brutal machinery, but a mirror surface polished to a shine is turned to the ground, reflecting the roof of the stylobate and the hulls themselves and making the superstructure visually soar over the main volume - a technique that in this year, many are familiar with the project of the Russian pavilion at EXPO-2015 in Milan.
Four years later, an office building was built on the adjacent site of nps tchoban voss, which became
the headquarters of the Coca-Cola company. Yes, this is exactly the rare case when the object was not made for the company, but the company chose for itself a building that exactly matches its spirit. “As in the case of the hotel, here the design code provided for working in a terracotta palette, the same for the entire territory of the former port, but this time we decided not to use brick, but to retell its color scheme in a modern way,” explains Sergei Choban. For cladding the facades, the architect used rectangular panels of five different shades of red, from muted pink to maroon, some of them matte, others glossy, which made it possible to create a surface that is both bright and textured. With such “pixelated” facades, the office complex faces the street and block driveways, but it looks at the river with panoramic windows. And since this is the south side, the architects placed stationary blinds of the same shades of red on top of the glass: thin horizontal slats make the color literally flow along the facade, and this impression is multiplied by the slightly concave shape of the sun shading elements. Extremely simple in form, this building, thanks to its memorable attire, has turned into a noticeable color accent of the renewed Osthafen. And it really falls into the corporate palette of Coca-Cola so precisely that the company only had to place its bright red logo above the main entrance.
And, finally, a little further along the embankment according to the nps tchoban voss project is being built
residential complex White Cube. As you can guess from the name of the project, in this case, the architects still deviated from the color code they once proposed. “With the help of a different color, we wanted, first of all, to emphasize the residential function - new for Osthafen,” says Sergei Tchoban. This color has become dazzling white - it does not need a textured surface for "sounding", therefore in this case architects work only with form, giving it, in comparison with neighbors, a more active and free plastic. In terms of plan, the residential complex was shaped like a trapezoid, all corners of which are rounded. The balconies will be the same rounded, of which there are three varieties in the project: from the river side the apartments will receive impressive open terraces, on the opposite side, that is, to the street, modest corner balconies are facing, but the side facades are decorated with triangular "captain's bridges" protruding forward just enough to catch a view of the water. There are three such balconies on each floor, and, lined up in a row, with their elongated and at the same time rounded shape, they resemble a foaming crest of a wave, entering into an active dialogue not only with the surrounding buildings, but also with the Spree itself.
Hotel by the Main Station
Next stop is Berlin Main Station. In the immediate vicinity of it, the Berlin office of Sergei Tchoban is completing the construction of a large hotel complex, in which two operators will work at once -
the more budgetary Ibis and the more luxurious Amano. “This site is associated with a rather long professional discussion that took place in the city: the very scale of the station, its style, as well as the architecture of government buildings on the opposite bank of the Spree, seemed to dictate the appearance of other equally noticeable objects here, but in reality in the areas surrounding the Hauptbahnhof, for a very long time, nothing happened, - says the architect. “In the end, the chief architect of Berlin, Regula Luscher, announced several tenders at once for the development of plots, in one of which the hotel was to appear”. The nps tchoban voss won this competition by offering a solution that is both stylish and delicate.
The complex, which is to exist in the area of a gigantic structure of glass and steel, was originally conceived as an object, on the one hand, extremely material, and on the other - emphasized environmental. Its façade is made of bricks, the color range of which varies in the range of gray, greenish and ocher shades, which is why, from a distance, the masonry resembles, rather, a rough skin. The stone blinds invented by the authors also add texture to them: architects emphasize each window opening with the help of vertical inserts made of material comparable in size to the window itself. Moreover, on one side of these inserts there are two: one of them is recessed deeper, the second, on the contrary, is pushed forward, which together creates a seemingly simple but multidimensional frame for glass. And due to the fact that the architects constantly change the location of the double inserts, the windows themselves move along the facade, picking up and developing at the macro level the theme of alternating light and dark bricks in the masonry.
The place where the two hotels meet is shown by a broken roof line and a light concrete junction. Interestingly, this detail was originally provided for in the winning project, but the customer refused to implement it. And the bureau took a desperate step, investing its own funds in order to realize the building in the form in which it was conceived and agreed. “This, if you like, is our responsibility to the city - to implement the project the way the city has chosen it. In addition, when you work with architecture, in which there are few details, special attention should be paid to the quality of execution of each of them, otherwise there is a very great chance of slipping into facelessness, creating a surface on which the eye has nothing to cling to, says Sergei Tchoban, deeply convinced that the professionalism and success of a modern architect is measured precisely by the ability to make high-quality environmental buildings.
White Tower on the Spree
Having made a circle around the city, we again return to the Eastern Harbor, only we approach it now from the other side. The buildings already seen are quickly left behind, and the famous Berlin TV tower with a round ball under the spire closes the perspective of Mühlenstrasse. In the area of the equally famous East Side Gallery, this view is flanked by two high-rise volumes - the headquarters of the Mercedes company and
residential complex Living Levels, the construction of which has just been completed. He is our last stop for today.
The 14-storey tower was erected on the banks of the Spree, and it is separated from the water only by a comfortable embankment. This site, enviable in all respects, was once part of a rather ambitious master plan for the development of the embankment in the Berlin Wall area, which included the creation of several high-rise volumes here. Later, the city revised the altitude regulations downward, but one dominant had already been approved by that time, and Berlin does not know of cases when the issued building permits were revoked. However, no one had any doubts that a high-rise should appear in this place, and with a very expressive silhouette - after the tower of the Mercedes auto-concert by the Gewers & Pudewill bureau was built here, the capable balance it with the vertical. In a sense, the color of the second skyscraper was also a foregone conclusion: the "automobile" tower is made of black glass, and adding another dark dominant would mean frankly darkening the palette of the entire area. White-painted metal panels became the ideal solution - the snow-white gloss not only makes the building elegant, but also unequivocally hints at the highest class of housing located here.
Indeed, housing in Living Levels meets the highest standards, and gets the most out of its location: each apartment here is oriented at least to two cardinal points. Actually, the desire to provide future residents with the most interesting views from the windows in many respects dictated the architectural and planning solution of the high-rise. Not only are all apartments located along the outer perimeter of residential floors and are glazed as much as possible, each of them is also pushed out of the main volume, acquiring additional perspectives due to the consoles. Consoles (for design reasons and in order not to visually crush the facade too much, the apartments are combined in pairs into two-storey blocks) appear on all three facades that have visual contact with water, and these numerous "shifts" actually form the tectonics of the tower. It resembles a woodpile, the strict and rhythmic structure of which is emphasized with the help of horizontal lines of interfloor floors and deaf vertical inserts, visually separating the blocks from each other. It is noteworthy that the corner from the Mühlenstrasse side is completely lined with metal, but the key theme for the building of displacements and displacements can be read here: the narrow verticals of the staircase windows are also located on the facade with an offset relative to each other, and the consoles are perfectly readable "in profile", giving a snow-white tower, a sophisticatedly elegant and at the same time very dynamic silhouette.
