Doing Almost Nothing

W.I.P. by J.Y.Ooi


part i

  1. Preface
  2. Kurfürstendamm
  3. Prehistory
  4. Dichotomy of Ku’damm

part ii

  1. Aggregate and Adler
  2. Crisis
  3. Brief

part iii

  1. Precarity
  2. Emancipation
  3. Plans
  4. Trajectory
  5. Outcome(?)

PART IV

  1. References
  2. Credit

Brief




“The building should serve public needs in a broader sense...The studio explores the questions of permanence, re-programming, re-use and to find the appropriate amount of new construction within a given framework.”

— Philip Rieseberg, Studio Master


Under the mentorship of Philip Rieseberg (STUDIO MARS), Studio I: “To Be Continued” engages participants in reimagining Phase 1 (originally retail podium) of Project FURST — a stalled speculative development on Berlin’s Kurfürstendamm. The studio challenges architects to reclaim agency within a neoliberal urban context, transforming derelict fragments of capitalist ambition into infrastructures of collective care. Students interrogate the paradoxes of speculative urbanism, proposing interventions that prioritize communal value over private profit and adaptive reuse over tabula rasa development.

The project focuses on Kurfürstendamm Blocks 206 and 209, the symbolic “portal” to the boulevard.









Site Map (1:2000): https://freight.cargo.site/m/B2250012084801119801874693104974/Site-A3.pdf

Design Challenge: No predefined program is given, demanding that we critically justify our proposals.

Navigating a contextually sparse brief, I position myself as an architect invited into the quagmire of Project FURST — a development paralyzed by financial insolvency and speculative overreach. While the academic framework permits unbridled formalism, I instead embrace the constraints: What if we treat this ‘doomed’ project not as a failure, but as a provocation to rethink architectural agency?