The horizontally elongated block of almost 50 meters in height stands out in size even in a completely non-chamber environment not far from the disappeared border of West Berlin, where Axel Springer moved his headquarters from Hamburg in 1966. Now the highway next to it bears his name, and different divisions of the publishing house occupy not only the original high-rise "plate", but offices around. But now the media concern has another building of its own, which allows us to talk about the campus, which is what OMA is doing, calling this building for 3500 people.
It really resembles a campus with its structure: thanks to the diamond-shaped atrium in the section, the glass wall facing the old Axel Springer building, the interior is filled with air and light. Each floor has a traditional part with a ceiling that opens onto an atrium and turns into an open terrace. Zones with regular work desks coexist with less formal ones, but the architects' goal was not a variety of office furniture.
Koolhaas and his colleagues designed with the unpredictable future of digital media in mind - Axel Springer has already switched to digital, but it is completely unknown how this area will develop further. The building is neutral enough in layout to be suitable for different scenarios, even if they are difficult to imagine now.
The authors of the project were also worried about something else: digitalization divided the employees - both the architectural bureau and the editorial office. Previously, they all worked together in a physical, paper format, it was easy to see what colleagues were doing and get involved. Now the employee's relationship is primarily built with his computer, and not with his desktop neighbor, it is the machine or the digital environment that serves as an intermediary for all contacts.
But if architects retain all pre-digital deadlines, they are helped out by completely physical layouts and tablets, then digital editors are no longer in a hurry to hand over the next issue to the printing house, and having received it back, they would rather consider how it came out. The date of publication is important, but not nearly as important as it used to be: we did not have time to publish the article today - we will release it tomorrow morning, and it often makes no sense to collect texts in a number. Each journalist is working on his own individual task, which is completely unrelated to the tasks of others. You can often just as well work from home, as the pandemic has proven.
The atrium and intersecting terraces, openness and permeability of the workspace, even for the general public (lobby with cafes, restaurants, showrooms and TV studios, a bridge and a green roof bar) should help restore this sense of community. Will it work out - time will tell, but this is already social engineering, but with the "formal" architecture, OMA definitely succeeded. The new Axel Springer building, even before it opened, made no small impression that an achievement in Berlin, a city accustomed to architectural gestures.
