Kulturforum Berlin

Located between the Landwehrkanal and the Tiergarten, next to the border to East-Berlin, the area of the cultural center is surrounded by a number of cultural buildings, some of them existing and some under construction, which are based on two different, opposed, urban and architectural philosophies. On the one hand, the only historical building, the St. Matthews Church and Mies van der Rohe's National Gallery, based on the classicist attitude and its rectangular grid, on the other hand the buildings of Scharoun as the Philharmonic Hall and the State Library - free floating enormous solitary structures of a marked free-form expressionist tendency. The project mediates between these two fundamentally different attitudes by means of two squares (one level, one inclined) bordered by canals and buildings. The two rectangular buildings are a house of the church of mainly cultural purpose (areas for performances and a music academy for church music) and a small exhibition pavilion while the curved colonnade, which forms the transition between the rectangular and the expressionist tendencies, house a restaurant, galleries and dance studios. This newly built area will form the nucleus of the cultural center of Berlin and provide the entrance to the main cultural buildings - including the new museum complex.
Invited International Competition 1983, First Prize, Design development and working drawing stage, construction was pending