Cultural Shelter for Diverse Berlin
Pratt Institute, Design 401, 2010 Summer
Critic: Jonas Coersmeier & Gisela Baurmann
Program: Memorial
Location: Berlin, Germany
Project Partner: Brian Chu, David Kim
“...With the New York group comprised of Korean and American students, we aim to make a constructive and critical contribution to the ongoing Unity Memorial discussion. The formulated vision addresses a broad notion of unity – in the German as well as a global context. In a speculative investigation of memorial locations and through an immersive concept they strive to find a positive expression for multi -and social media that places Berlin and its memorial as one within a global context of contemporary metropolises.”
- Studio description by prof. Jonas Coermeier
Throughout our journey as foreign students in Berlin, we have realized that there is still an ongoing process of inner unification within Germany. As a result of our research and experiences, we believe that a successful memorial, in an appropriate location, can support and celebrate the ongoing process of the unification. Our goal was to design a memorial that can engage with the city in order to interact with the daily lives of the people living in Berlin.
The proposal for the Unity and Freedom Memorial is to create a large open pavilion that gets situated on a newly landscaped but underutilized park in Potsdamer Bahnhof, called the Tilla-Durieux park. The pavilion will provide a variety of open programs to the public, including public gathering spaces, exterior exhibition area, recreation area, music venue, and interior gallery space. All the programs are situated on the existing park, and the unifying physical form of the roof structure responds to the individual programs along with the parametrically controlled apertures that varies in sizes. This open yet protected pavilion structure was carefully decided to be used so the visitors can use the memorial at any given time of the day, maximizing the public interactions in a most engaging manner.