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The proposal, a post-post-Fordist factory intended to host culture, is a critique of the industrial conversion and an alternative to today’s creative office.
Questioning whether the Modern office has truly been challenged since Mies, the project urges the discussion to move away from the desk and become a conversation about space, as it proposes to solidify the cubicle, inverting the Seagram model and the liquid condition of its open plan. By solidifying the desk, instead allowing the envelope to be ambiguous, the proposal aims to re-define the way we produce culture, in particular architectural culture, re-establishing the relationship between process and space.
As creative offices and co-working locations have occupied out-of-use industrial buildings, the question of space has lost relevance. As with any cultural production — its nature is not linear. An architectural project emerges from a complex loop of processes — from existing as an idea to becoming a model, an image, a publication, ending up in a debate, on a shelf in a library or in the city. The re-appropriated factories found in Berlin, and elsewhere, designed to accommodate an assembly line, are not appropriate for a space where one produces and consumes architecture. The Culture Factory puts forward a new model — one which precisely through its permanence accommodates for the specific needs of a creative professional, allowing for nomadic inhabitation.
A response to Berlin’s current status of a cultural mecca, the proposal re-activates the Köpenicker Straße ex-industrial strip, providing infrastructure for production of Berlin’s new industry - culture.
The solid exterior and liquid interior of the Seagram
Re-activated ex-industrial strip
