Berlin Architecture

Berlin Architecture

In 1999, Jörg Ebers was 30 years old, living in Berlin and finishing his architectural degree. But instead of looking for an architecture job, he decided to construct a building of his own. “I was hoping for something I could both live in and use as a kind of three-dimensional business card,” said Mr. Ebers, 40, who now has his own architecture company, Ebers Architekten.

The architect Jörg Ebers’ building on Berlin-Mitte’s Auguststrasse is covered in 300,000 olive-green mosaic tiles. The unusual placement of the windows on the building’s borders is the architect’s “confetti facade,” he said, where internal rooms, not external factors, determine the position of he windows.

At the time, the German capital was a real estate frontier, especially in the area that was formerly East Berlin. Looking for land, Mr. Ebers came across a small vacant lot, or “Baulücke” (a German word meaning, “a gap between buildings”), on Auguststrasse in Berlin-Mitte, a neighborhood with a burgeoning arts scene, that was then being used as an entrance area to an underground nightclub called Cookie’s.

The lot had been empty for half a century. The original building, built in the 1880s, was destroyed by a fire during World War II. But the German Democratic Republic’s communist government didn’t see much use for a lot measuring only 154 square meters (1,658 square feet). After the Berlin wall came down in 1989, Berlin’s urban-planning agency declared it “unbuildable.”

More about Berlin architecture here.