Outcome(?)
"A building is what it wants to be. The architect waits in patience until it tells him."
—
Louis Kahn
ViewsBusiness by Cartoon Movement-US.
The elevation facing the main road rejects formal facadism, its skeletal structure swathed in provisional plastic mesh—a raw, unapologetic counterpoint to Kurfürstendamm’s polished commercial veneer. This intentional anti-facade reframes the building’s identity: not as a static icon, but as an urban threshold.
This drawing envisions spaces charged with the potential for unscripted occupation—a vision catalyzed by Ryuichi Sakamoto’s performance in that austere school hall, where an audience’s collective presence transformed utility into transcendence.
The staircases and elevator shafts are introduced as strategic insertions—minimalist volumes rendered as abstract boxes in the drawings. Depicting these elements as simplified boxes rejects hyperrealistic rendering, instead foregrounding their potentiality. The drawings are not static blueprints but open scores.
The monolithic structure recedes into spectral ambiguity, its edges blurred by snowfall. At ground level, the landscape is stripped to a raw, mineral palette—frost-heaved earth and skeletal vegetation mirroring the building’s latent stillness.
In this seasonal atrophy, the architecture’s purpose pivots. Could its cavernous interior, now divorced from summer’s performative bustle, become a resonant chamber for collective ritual?
This drawing envisions an architecture of ecological agency, where the ground floor is ceded to a self-generating landscape. By importing raw soil and relinquishing control to natural processes—succession, decay, spontaneous growth—the building surrenders its facade to the unruly vitality of flora.
The landscape evolves into a living, breathing epidermis, its seasonal mutations becoming the structure’s true face.
Here, the building is no longer protagonist but stage—a static scaffold for nature’s improvisational theater.
Why design a facade when you can cultivate an ecosystem?
The series above unveils the vertical choreography of Strata I—a sequence of sectional vignettes that slice through each floor, exposing the building’s spatial rhythm. These perspectives trace a narrative of interconnected volumes, from the tectonic rawness of the basement to the diaphanous interplay of light in the upper tiers.
The staircase—a vertiginous incision slicing through the building’s stratified slabs—transcends mere circulation to become a vertically choreographed intervention. Encircling this void, polycarbonate panels form a translucent veil, their milky surfaces diffusing light into a spectral glow that radiates outward as a luminous beacon after dark.
By day, sunlight fractures through the polycarbonate, casting prismatic shadows that animate adjacent spaces. By night, artificial light transforms the void into a lantern—a nod to Louis Kahn’s “served and servant” spaces, where infrastructure becomes spectacle.
Here, the process of construction is laid bare, celebrating the provisional as permanent. Why cloak structure in veneer when light and shadow can articulate its essence?
This project rejects the fiction of a finalized rendering—an architect’s narcissistic wager on omniscience. Instead, I offer fragmentary vignettes: speculative flashes of what could be, not what must be. The building remains stubbornly unresolved because its true authorship lies beyond me.
Email me for an open-source 3D model—a skeletal framework. Download it. Hack it. Reinterpret, reimagine, and redefine. Insert your own programmatic DNA into its voids.
This is architecture as participatory praxis, where the designer cedes control to catalyze collective creativity.
The project’s core provocation isn’t formal, but philosophical: Can a building exist as a living blueprint, its meaning perpetually rewritten by those who engage with it? Here, the ‘user’ becomes co-author, and the architect—merely the first collaborator in an infinite chain.
Design, after all, is not a product but a conversation. Let this model be the opening sentence.