Architecture Competition
2021
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together with
Niklas Nalbach
Berlin Techno Booth Competition
Small Scale Architecture Appreciation Movement
Multitude
Techno, Towers and other Flowers
Design Statement
At the heart of our design lies a question: How did Berlin’s club culture emerge and shape space?
In the aftermath of the Wall’s collapse, a subculture from West Berlin began to infiltrate the voids of the East—abandoned buildings, broken bunkers, and forgotten ruins. It was a quiet invasion: to discover, to annex, to occupy. These actions—radical yet poetic—formed the conceptual framework for a spatial gesture, suspended in time and steeped in ephemerality.
The architecture channels this fleeting energy into form.
Dancing in isolation becomes an immersive bodily act—a visceral release sparked by the pulse of techno, unfolding within the layered tension of the urban fabric. This choreography of movement translates into a composition of space: a simple rectangle fragmented into L-shaped modules, each one echoing an act of appropriation.
These Ls are not fixed; they are invitations. They are stacked, interlocked, loosely aligned—held together not by force, but by gravity and trust. Their arrangement gives rise to a vertical construct: fragile, skeletal, unfinished. Like the early club spaces, it feels temporary, improvised, open to transformation.
This structural ambiguity becomes a design tool.
The wooden Ls rest delicately upon one another, creating a system that resists permanence. Assembly and disassembly are not just practical necessities—they are performances. The builder becomes a choreographer, a co-author shaping the identity of the space in real time. No configuration is final. Each iteration reflects a moment, a mood, a use.
From its origin as a techno booth, the installation expands into a polyphonic urban artifact: part stage, part sculpture, part gathering point. It can host a set, exhibit artwork, provide a place to rest—or rise into a techno tower. Use is undefined; meaning emerges through appropriation.
The act of climbing becomes a ritual of conquest.
Ladders stitched into the structure invite ascent, descent, reinterpretation. And as a final gesture—an echo of destruction and rebirth—the Ls are charred. Their blackened surfaces evoke ruin, memory, resistance. In burning, they become relics of an architecture that refuses monumentality—an architecture meant to be occupied, transformed, and ultimately, let go.
