Tactile Model

Quotations from History

As part of the International Building Exhibition (IBA) 1987, Aldo Rossi and Gianni Braghieri built this residential and commercial building on Wilhelmstrasse at the corner of Kochstrasse. The façade of red clinker brick alludes to modernist architecture with its strictly geometrical structure. Its designers supplemented it with some playful elements: six stairwells with pointed-gable roofs and green metal cladding structure the complex as a whole. An oversized, non-load-bearing white column marks the corner of the L-shaped volume.

The stairwells that are marked yellow on the tactile model and the column can be pushed out. The separate black blocks of the building can then be connected. This demonstrates the playful “postmodernist” approach to the simple functionality of “modernism”.

Modell+Design, Technische Universität Berlin
Design: Malte Knipping

Introduction to the Exhibition Section


Cautious Diversity

To find paths to West Berlin’s future, Hans-Christian Müller, Berlin’s Senate Building Director, initiated the International Building Exhibition 1984/87 (IBA). The goal was to reinstate the inner city as an attractive place to live and thereby maintain the population.

The architect Josef Paul Kleihues, a critic of the evolution of urban design in postwar modernist architecture, was appointed as planning director for the areas of new construction. Under the principle of “Critical Reconstruction,” and with the support of a number of important international architects, Kleihues created alternatives to modern urban design. Taking into account both the historical structure of the city and contemporaneous expectations for housing, diverse buildings were realized. Their often contradictory, sometimes seemingly arbitrary formulations earned this decade in architecture the reproach “anything goes.” Its authors included some who had developed their approaches mainly theoretically, such as Raimund Abraham, John Hejduk, and Hans Hollein. On the occasion of the IBA, they were given the rare opportunity to turn their ideas into reality. The IBA also introduced new design elements and urban housing types, such as the motif of the column used for decoration, the still popular “multifamily villa,” and the emerging style of deconstructivism.