How can growing, self-regulating structures be created? What architectural expressions arise when thermal and physical logic become the basis for a design process? What happens when focussing on the ecological conditions and nature of a place, when leaving a place to nature? What does this mean for the city as a statistical space? 

Berlin is a city of the unfinished. A city that has never stopped growing but is constantly changing from within. In response to significant population growth, the Berlin Senate is aiming to build 140,000 new flats by 2030. At the same time, Berlin wants to be ‘Schwammstadt‘ and rethink its approach in view of extreme climatic conditions. The biotope mapping of West Berlin initiated by Herbert Sukopp in the 1980s is considered a pioneering project in the development of an urban ecological perspective on urban space: In view of the need for an inner-city biotope network, that enables connectivity and species exchange even under conditions of urban fragmentation, he understands city and nature as mutually dependent factors, not as an either-or relationship. Furthermore, the Berlin Senate has been pursuing the strategy ‘Entsiegelungspotenziale in Berlin‘ since 2010 to categorise areas that could potentially be unsealed. By approaching an alternative reading of the city, the design project identifies those defects within the urban biotope network and performs repairs on urban ecological level. The supposed conflict between densification and unsealing provides a basis for rethinking the question of redensification and urban ecosystems. 

The design works with an equivalence of scales giving equal weight to the small as to the large: a system emerges in which building and nature interact adaptively, structures are created that are actively linked to their environment and strengthen urban ecosystems. The building is understood as part of a larger urban organism. Every small cycle is placed in the context of an overall ecological system, every intervention is part of a balance at city level.