This project is one of the wining proposals for the Berlin University Residences international student competition organized by ARCHmedium in 2016.
The location was particularly relevant for the project strategy. A valued vacant plot next to the river in the trendy neighbourhood of Kreuzberg, where a party wall use to have one of the most emblematic works of the Italian street artist BLU.
Architects: Borja Aznar Montero, Sara Contreras Escribano, Mónica de la Peña, Marta Galeano, Reyes Sánchez Llorca and Adrián Ocaña.
Status: Concept
Project Memory
Berlin as colour. Berlin as integration of diverse conditions, aims and needs. Berlin as a destroyed, divided and rebuilt city. Berlin as a graffiti, painted and repainted once and over again.
Once upon a time there was a city made of colours. In this city there was a long, long narrow building where depending on your (needs, ambition, condition) you could choose the way of enhancing your apartment.
We propose a minimum living space included in a block of 3 meters wide and 170 long slightly separated from the plot’s party wall. This essential living space, combined in different ways to present a huge variety of typologies, is ideal for providing encounters, integration and diversity, some of the characteristics of nowadays young people, students and travellers.
To the inside, towards the party wall: the creation zone. A generative area for communications and communal living where elevators, stairs and platforms, are mixed up to host a creative and participating environment.
To the outside, towards the square: the exhibition zone. An area for diffusion, where anyone can choose to display, advertise, reveal, hide and transmit to the neighbours letting them participate from an always changing- living-canvas. This façade, composed by small gadgets, intends to give Graffcity´s residents not only the opportunity to gain an extra use in their living space but also, and more important, to choose their way of creating the city, a new Berlin.
COLLECTIVE +626
Collective +626 is a group of six young spanish architects: Borja Aznar Montero, Sara Contreras Escribano, Mónica de la Peña, Marta Galeano, Reyes Sánchez Llorca and Adrián Ocaña. They all met during their architectural studies at the Escuela Técnica Superior de Arquitectura de Madrid (ETSAM) and although they have pursued different professional careers worldwide ever since, they keep a common architectural approach and enjoy working together whenever they have a chance.