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

Always Building




“Architecture is not about building. It is about enabling others to build.”

— Cedric Price




Phase II: Building Trajectory Committee
This strategy rejects static "completion," advocating instead for an open-ended architectural practice — Always Building. At its core is a Building Trajectory Committee, a decentralized body comprising Berlin’s residents, architects, city councilors, engineers, artists, academics, and grassroots organizations. Their mandate: to perpetually reimagine the site’s use through incremental, community-led interventions.

  • Real estate developers and architects collaborate not on blueprints, but on frameworks for temporal occupation: winter shelters, summer workshops, autumn markets.
  • Local creatives and placemakers curate ephemeral programs, transforming the ruin into a stage for dissent, care, or celebration.
  • Engineers retrofit the skeleton for adaptability, not permanence—modular systems that welcome decay as part of the process.

The collapse of Adler Group and Aggregate Holdings revealed the folly of fetishizing “finishings.” Here, the shell’s rawness becomes its virtue: a scaffold for collective agency. Funds are diverted from cladding to catalyzing conversations—hosting assemblies, tool libraries, or skill-sharing hubs.

This is not a compromise, but a new architectural paradigm: unbuilding as practice. The committee’s work isn’t about designing a building, but designing the conditions for its becoming. Let the relic be a chameleon — today a workshop, tomorrow a clinic, next year a archive of failures.

Berliners have always excelled at repurposing voids into vessels of resistance. Let this site be no different: a monument not to capital, but to the messy, vital act of making together.