The property is located in a historically significant place: In the 1920s, it was a primarily Jewish colony of journalists and artists; later, the Berlin Wall ran directly through the place, which was declared a restricted area, only to be rediscovered after the fall of the Wall by Berliners as a sought-after residential and weekend destination between lake and river.

 

In reminiscence of the almost hundred-year-old brick buildings in the village, the new building with about 250 square meters of living space is designed to be clear, cubic and reduced, open to the landscape, resting in itself, natural, modern and, despite its classic timeless appearance, anchored in the present with all the technical comforts of our age.

 

The site presented an astonishing urban planning task, namely the siting of the new building on the unusually large plot of land, the former communal soccer field in the center of the village.

 

The concept is purist: an angular complex without projections and recesses with a flat roof, reduced to two materials for the facade: brick and glass. As a third element: the more than hundred-year-old copper beech, framed by the angular complex, is located on the adjacent property with the house of Grete Ring.

 

On the street side, the building seems scale-less due to the lack of openings and appears more as a sculpture than a single-family house in the spacious garden. To the garden, the ground floor opens over an angle with a floor height of over 3m with a large-format glass facade with narrow steel profiles. Large sliding glass elements let the outdoors into the house and remove the boundary between the interior and the garden.

 

Spatially interlaced around the staircase, which is set at the point of articulation of the angle as a wooden sculpture, various visual axes are created through the building, accentuated by skylights sin some areas.

 

In terms of building technology, the building is state of the art; multiple control mechanisms allow remote management. Heating is provided by a low-temperature surface heating system with a heat pump from geothermal energy, using geothermal probes that reach deep into the sand of the Mark Brandenburg. All pre-equipment for energy self-sufficient operation has already been made.

 

The main house is supplemented by a wooden, approx. 100 square meter large adjoining building in the rear part of the property. Thus, as a new building of a house with annexes, it draws parallels into the historical context of the large Wilhelminian villas on the Havel and the brick houses of the modern era from the 1920s. Situated directly on the former Berlin Wall strip between the Havel and Sacrow Lake, the property is located in the area of a preservation statute and poses a special challenge to the design: To stand appropriately and at the same time self-confidently within the historically complex context.