---

Bachelor Project

At the centre of the Bachelor course is a design project run over the course of a semester. The project, framed within a thematic investigation, is carried out in small groups, each contributing to a wider group study of a given situation. A specific neighbourhood or context is chosen within which students act on a variety of sites.

The focus is in the design of buildings, interiors and urban spaces from strategic thinking to construction detail. The course encourages a growing sensitivity to the character of the city and how the design of a building engages with the wider character of the urban context.

Alongside the design project a lecture series is run addressing related themes.

---

SS 25 – Bachelor Project To do more with less
Infill at the edge, Berlin

Perhaps more than any other European city, Berlin has been the subject of major infrastructural change either by design or because of war or overarching masterplans by monarchy and maniacal visionaries. Crudely divided in two by the Berlin wall from 1961 to 1989 any previous urban coherence was lost, and the city has experienced a collision of very different narratives, concepts and projects since. It has therefore evolved over time as a result of half-finished dreams, pragmatically led transport plans and small-scale interventions on its urban fabric. It is a city in a constant state of transformation, beautiful in its incompleteness and improvisation.

Perceived as ugly or antiurban in the conventional sense, this fragmentation is also an expression of heterogeneity and diversity and could in fact represent the image of the European city of the future. A future that by necessity, either due to the climate emergency or by the increasing pluralism within social structure, evolves in a more open-ended way. Robert Venturi’s idea of the ‘both-and’ suggesting a new pluralism and a new tolerance in architecture and Alison and Peter Smithson’s interpretation of the ‘as found’ as a new way of seeing the ordinary, remain relevant and poignant in this new cycle of the European city. This new precariousness is what we must make sense of as we speculate upon the future just as others have done in the past like Peter Smithson who, while participating in a symposium on BBC Radio’s Third Programme in 1956, was asked what he thought the future (‘tomorrow’) would be like. He replied: ‘Well tomorrow, I think, will not only be rather like today but rather like primitive times and rather like the Middle Ages, and rather like life on the moon, if man ever gets there …’

It is now our imperative to find a new language of architecture; an architecture of reuse, an architecture that creates the new from the existing, that reassembles and reinterprets things. New and old are equal parts of this architecture, neither one more precious than the other and this sense of the ‘ongoing’ makes the project more clearly part of the constant process of transformation. One important factor relevant to both the transformation of existing buildings or new building is the circularity of materials and the recovery, reuse and re-application of materials previously used, contributing to reducing emissions, waste and resource consumption by returning materials to the cycle after a period of use. To integrate this new emphasis into the conventions of architectural thinking, up until now led by the guidance of proportion, exacting material detail and volumetric coherence is a significant challenge. How can we work without such certainty, without such completeness while retaining a conceptual and strategic rigour? Perhaps it is about finding discipline and guidance through a lightness of touch, an economy of means and a pleasure in the improvised and unfinished?

Berlin is growing, pushing further and further to the periphery. Open spaces, commercial and production areas in outer districts such as Lichtenberg are increasingly being competed for by both businesses and creative industries. The fabric of these edge-places is characterised by gaps and discontinuities, different building types, blank walls and undefined space between things. These areas have an improvised architectural character, and they prompt the question as to what is an appropriate form and material language to adopt. This will be the context of our work this semester as we design buildings of mixed use in the semi-industrialised areas of Lichtenberg and work within the constraints and opportunities of urban mining - recovering and reusing the city’s waste material to make resilient buildings for the unknown future – to do more with less.

Stephen Bates and Bruno Krucker, March 2025

To do more with less Infill at the edge, Berlin