LOCATION: Berlin
BUDGET: £N/A
STAGE: Concept
BUDGET: £N/A
STAGE: Concept
Photograph of a portable bluetooth scanner, plotting using a GPS module.
Situated within one of the remaining vestiges of Berlin’s industrial rail network, the Inhabited Embankment nestles programmes into pockets of undesirable space. Park am Gleisdreieck, a former shunting yard that remained abandoned since the turn of the Cold War, resisted residential development in favour of urban rewilding, preserving a distended outline of the longstanding infrastructural form. The chosen site, positioned within a convergent position littered with an overlapping series of intertwined rail services, provides the opportunity for the creation of a new infrastructure that will morph the existing landscape 100 years into the future, reforming the concept of urban living by intertwining the human and ecological domain through the language of passage, providing safe crossings for both human and nature.
Facing the railway, a thick rammed earth wall protects the scheme and neighbouring communities against the booming acoustics produced by the underground and national train services. Sprouting from this embankment is a series of glulam columns that form taller, lighter acoustic protection constructed of woven willow within framing. This embankment then expands and contracts at varying stages along the rail line, with the potential to be installed at any length along the railway. Bearing over this wall exists a seldom roof, providing a ‘green bridge’ that permits the crossing of human and non-human inhabitants. Under this bridge, this pocket of space provides a market for both fresh produce from independent companies and individuals over two stories. This produce is either supplied externally, or produced on-site within the ‘Vertical factories,’ or ‘vessels’. These flexible and adaptable CLT buildings, externally supported by steel columns, provide the ability to changed and adapted when the purpose requires changing, for example, from a factory to a café restaurant.
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