A stabilizing core, a spatial skeleton, and a panoramic view over Berlin, an immense urban backdrop.

We understand the redesign of this 1970s apartment in the spirit of Paulo Mendes da Rocha's interventions in his apartments at the Edifício Jaraguá in São Paulo: as an oasis above the city. A place shaped by ceiling fans and the evaporative cooling of surrounding plants—a form of cohabitation on the 15th floor.

The fragmented three-room layout with its internal corridor, windowless kitchen, and enclosed bathroom was removed. In its place, we introduced a central core, a tiled bench that mirrors the beam, and lowered the windows to create floor-to-ceiling openings framing Berlins cityscape.

We embraced and preserved as found built-in cabinetry, integrating it into the new layout. Turned 90 degrees and placed parallel to the inner wall a curtain now allows the contents to be revealed or concealed as needed. The tone of the wood set the direction for the material palette, with all timber elements in American cherry finished with oil.

An inserted core interlocks with the four rooms, much like the modular façade elements of Friedrich Kracht found on the ground floor. Just as in Mendes da Rocha's work, this creates a continuous loop through the apartment, which can be zoned as needed through three sliding doors. We admire the tiles of Higienópolis and reinterpret them here in a range of colors, giving each room its own distinct character.

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The design draws on strategies learned from the large housing blocks of 1920s. The balcony layers link the buildings together - like holding hands - creating a continuous, shared facade while maintaining clear distinctions between the individual houses. This connecting element separates public and private realms while creating a permeable and vibrant facade zone. In this way, the qualities of the Weiseritz green corridor are activated and views towards the historic old-town skyline are carefully staged.

The elevated corner building becomes an urban marker for the new quarter. A continuous plinth of light-grey clinker brick visually connects the buildings, forming an identity-defining ensemble.

Transformation of a former gdr toilet block into a cheerful place to sweat. The brickwork is precisely opened up with an opening towards the forest. A loggia provides spatial depth and creates a place for the smll village communty to linger and relax. The intervention remains minimally invasive. The house retains its charming, rugged character. Still used as a wood store, the surrounding firewood now acts as insulation and can also dry out well thanks to the warmth of the sauna.

The central window gives the house its name. In the cool of the night, it gets hot in the demi-lune sauna. In keeping with the name, a small nocturnal creature joins the project. An owl-shaped screen offers guest addiotnal privaciy if required. The moon-shaped view from the sauna itself is the staged anticipation, as a tranquil forest lake awaits guests behind the hill.

Cabinet, lamp, door handle and hook from maple woods created in collaboration with Arne Maxim Koll.

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Rotunda × Betula is a festival and biennale pavilion designed to be a source of joy and a memorable experience. On the outside, square panels of white birch bark create a calm, rhythmic skin that shimmers and immediately catches the eye. In this way it serves as a place of “aha” moments, welcoming visitors to arrive, linger, and connect. The pavilion functions both as a meeting point and a platform for events. Rotunda x Betula is particularly suited for programs that place sustainability, collective action, self-efficacy, and climate-conscious building practices and design at the center of their agenda.

Built from 342 identical stools made of birch bark and reclaimed wood. The ground module for the pavilion is a simple yet versatile stool, designed to combine two materials: reclaimed wood and birch bark. The square seat, measuring 450 mm x 450 mm, is crafted from triple-layered birch ply. Inside, the brownish backside of the birch bark softens sound offering an unexpected moment of focus and contemplation.  In this way, giving space to spark dialogue on adaptive reuse, bio-based materials, and experimental construction techniques. The interior of the Rotunda can, on the way it is engaged, become a space for deep exchange, reflection and slowness.

The strong and autonomous sculpture is equally suitable to be stages in an urban enviroment at a lake or beach or as an ethereal object within the forest. Serving either as a space for reflection and stillness, or as a setting for a performance.

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The competition for a new town hall in the Swiss harbor town of Romanshorn on Lake Constance presents an opportunity for us to explore constructive and spatial investigations of clay–hybrid structures.

A visit to renowned rammed earth pioneer Martin Rauch in nearby Schlins revealed the potential of rammed earth from both an energetic and building-physics perspective. The proposal is based on a pure timber frame structure, stabilized by steel bracing.

Within this framework, autonomous core volumes of rammed earth are inserted, accommodating staircases and ancillary spaces. The idea of the “earth building” continues onto the façade: here, the material is fired and, within the mineral context of the historic town, forms a ceramic envelope that defines the "Stadthaus".

A public viewing platform marks the center of town, oscillating in its perception between a traditional town hall tower with clock, a belvedere, and a lighthouse-like presence as a gateway to the harbor on Lake Constance.

Research at the Institute of Building Construction at TU Braunschweig (Prof. Dr. Helga Blocksdorf) focuses on the reintroduction of birch bark as a contemporary building material.

Work as a doctoral researcher is carried out within the framework of the inter- and transdiciplinary project opencultures, funded by the Stiftung Zukunft Niedersachsen and in cooperation with Julius-Kühn-Insitute and Universität Oldenburg.

The research includes the development of demonstrators and prototypes, the tracing of historical lineages, as well as material investigations and design-build projects.

For inquiries: s.barckhausen@tu-braunschweig.de

More at opencultures

For readers who value both fiction and scholarly literature, a persistent spatial dilemma emerges: either the depth of the shelf exceeds the requirements of standard-format books, leaving unused voids behind, or it proves insufficient for larger monographs and oversized volumes.

The Bikini Shelf addresses this discrepancy by accommodating both scales within a single system. Its central “free zone” introduces a deliberate void, creating spatial generosity that extends beyond mere storage—allowing for the placement, display, and ongoing arrangement of objects that accompany everyday life.

Structurally, the system is composed of paired shelving units that follow the constructive logic of a chair with an exaggeratedly high back. Between these vertical modules, intermediate shelves can be inserted like bridges—added, removed, or repositioned as needed.

The generous expansion of Kempten University of Applied Sciences called for a broadly differentiated program. We found ourselves thinking of the Daltons—a motley group united by a common goal, yet defined by distinct characters and abilities. A community of circumstance.

The daycare, administration building, auditorium, and laboratory are conceived as individual and idiosyncratic figures. Positioned along the site’s change in elevation, they assemble into an agora and become legible as a collective family. Open spaces are granted equal significance within the design, forming an integral part of the architectural composition.

In close collaboration with Bollinger Grohmann, tailored timber-hybrid structures were developed for each typology, while building services were reduced to a minimum together with Transsolar.

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Art as ritual, and the simple counter of a local «Kunstverein» as a shrine? To look at art - this gaze into another world - stages the threshold between here and there. Like a visit to Futami Okitama Shrine looking into the light of Ise Bay in Spring.

Reduced to its most pragmatic level, the task was simply to design a versatile table for a committed association: a display during exhibitions, a workspace for funding applications, a bar counter at openings, a large, flat table for board meetings, or compactly stored away.

The result is a demountable, storable table based on a plug-in system, with two cross-shaped legs that can be folded together using wing nuts.

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Material research: birch bark plywood panels are produced by applying heat and pressure to multiple layers of birch bark, forming a dense and stable material. Thanks to their cross-pressed construction, the panels gain structural capacity and can be used in composite building systems.

The material birch-bark-ply was developed and tested specifically for the project RONTUNDA x BETULA in collaboration with material researcher and birch bark supplier Tim Mergelsberg and Sagaan, Görlitz.

The material experiment with birch bark plywood represents a further line of investigation within private practice. It is motivated by an in-depth and layered engagement with the historical building material of birch bark, developed in the context of research at the IKON Institute for Construction under the guidance of Prof. Dr. Helga Blocksdorf  at TU-Braunschweig.

The work establishes a bridge, extending the field of research into real building practice, guided by an interest in constructive anomalies and unconventional assemblies.

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More about the material research in the journal "Reimagining Birch Bark, the Plastic of Prehistory" at revalu.io.

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The so-called Blue Land (Blaues Land) around Murnau am Staffelsee is a remarkable region in Upper Bavaria. The painter Gabriele Münter discovered the area together with her partner Wassily Kandinsky and chose to settle there permanently. “[…] nowhere had I seen such a wealth of views brought together as here […], between lake and high mountains, between rolling hills and moorlands.”

The spatial conception of her paintings—placing clear, geometrically defined figures against the backdrop of these composite landscapes—serves as the point of departure for our competition entry for a new fire station on a plateau near the historic town center.

The proposal envisions a pure timber structure. The L-shaped, low-lying building volume and the widely visible training tower are both protected and abstracted through a continuous envelope of hot-dip galvanized steel, lending the ensemble a unified and image-like presence.

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