Project Description
A new chapter for an icon of Berlin’s city history: Martin Jasper and his team at Jasper Architects, in collaboration with Gewers Pudewill, have completed the transformation of an aging iconic shopping mall into a modern place for work and retail in Berlin’s Friedrichshain neighborhood. The nearly 675,000 ft2 / 67,000 m2 project named “UP!” reveals the building’s past and points to its future with a new volumetric appearance and a new, entirely glazed building envelope directly on the public Hermann-Stöhr-Platz and walking distance to Berlin Ostbahnhof, the city’s mainline railway station. In order to create bright spaces for the new functions, the formerly closed cube was first gutted and then flooded with natural light via subtractions of the building volume on all four sides. In addition to these terraced incisions, two additional floors and a roof terrace bring plenty of light and air into the future offices. The project was completed in spring 2021.
“As an office that, among other locations, worked a lot in Argentina, the dimensions of the UP! were all too familiar: the existing building looked like a monolithic extrusion of a city block of Buenos Aires. Those are based on a grid size of around 100 by 100 meters – and keep confronting the architects with one main challenge: How is the provision of natural lighting for the buildings inside this city block granted and dealt with? To address this, cuts of all sizes and forms are made into the urban mass or some areas of the property are left free. In addition, urban planning regulations of different times overlap – and thereby create complex urban geometries that always arise from the same squared base of the city block. For us, this was an inspiration for our thoughts for UP! when designing the intervention to the existing building – and which gave us answers to a very specific problem through an international reference.” (Martin Jasper)
Concrete construction has a high impact in climate change due to the CO2 that is released during its production. Therefore, where possible, the usage of concrete in new building should be avoided or reduced where possible and existing buildings should be re-used to avoid new construction. The concept of the UP! is based on the maintenance of the existing concrete structure and is therefore way ahead of the new buildings with comparable dimensions in terms of its CO2 footprint. The sustainable goals were also consistently followed with regard to the building equipment. The quiet and constant beating heart of the building is its modern technology, which acts sustainably and automatically. Both, the lighting as well as the internal glare protection, are regulated through the building’s own weather station, that reacts to the indoor and outdoor temperature and the position of the sun. At a few selected concrete columns control stations are integrated, at which users can individually intervene in the programmed processes via touchscreens. A re-cooling plant is installed on the roof, that, together with heat exchangers in the sewer, becomes an independent energy center. This turns the UP! into one of the most sustainable buildings in Berlin – and it proved itself as such: the building was certified with the LEED Gold Standard Certification for sustainable buildings.