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Friedrichstadt Passagen

Berlin, Germany
Completed 1996
Winning Scheme, International Design Competition, 1991  

Office / retail / apartment complex with parking
 

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This project was proposed by the Berlin Senate to resuscitate the Friedrichstrasse, pre-war Berlin's main shopping street. An international competition specified development of three city blocks with connecting links, or Passagen. Ultimately it was deemed economically and politically judicious to award the individual blocks to different developer-architect teams. This proposal was consequently redesigned in specific response to its new location on the central block, retaining only the organic connections of the original scheme with underground parking and a retail concourse stretched across all three blocks.

The 42,000m² building is organized internally around a central courtyard with a star-shaped skylight that fills interior offices and upper-level apartments with natural light. Externally, the response is to the street. The strategy was not to disguise the building's bulk by breaking it artificially into smaller components, but to achieve a contemporary analogy to the traditional, more intimately scaled architecture of the Friedrichstrasse.

Acknowledging that the street wall is perceived sequentially rather than simultaneously, and obliquely rather than frontally, the façade was massed to reflect the diversity and incidental events inherent in the normal pattern of urban growth by accretion over the years. The design aims to demonstrate that large-scale commercial development can indeed be shaped so as to animate rather than oppress the urban scene.

Major Components

22,160m² offices; 1,800m² residential; 1200m² courtyards (3); 700m² ground floor atrium; 800m² Passagen Atrium; 6,800m² retail on 3 levels; 2 levels of underground parking for 260 cars

Pei Cobb Freed & Partners services

Full Architectural Services; Interior Design of public interiors; coordination with associate architect on construction documents and construction administration; winning scheme in international design competition

Associate Architect

Arge Friedrichstadt Passagen, Berlin

Structural

Polyne-Fink, Berlin 

Interiors

Anna Marie Jagdfeld and Carla Sozzani, Berlin

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