SAB office building, Saarbruecker Strasse 21

The SAB office building is embedded in the site of the historical Koenigstadt Brewery in Berlin-Prenzlauer Berg, directly on Saarbruecker Strasse, a street which takes its character from its Art Nouveau and Wilhelminian style architecture. The plot is located on the prominent edge of the Barnim Plateau and, in the innermost part of the street block, rises two metres from Saarbruecker Strasse. The new building occupies the free corner of the street and a private road leading into an extensive Gewerbehof (typical Berlin courtyard occupied by small industrial enterprises). Beer has not been brewed on the site of what was once Berlin's largest brewery for around 100 years. After an eventful history, the buildings are now in mixed use by neighbourhood initiatives, media companies, restaurants, and start-ups. The listed Gewerbehof of the Koenigstadt AG brewery dates to the ‘Wagner's Bairisch-Bier-Brauerei’ brewery, which was founded in 1849. Today it consists of six historical buildings framing the new office building. The former warehouse, built in 1872, is directly adjacent to SAB. The old vaulted cellar, which was used as a beer storage room, has been partly exposed, preserved, and sensitively integrated into the new building. The reinforced-concrete skeleton structure with five upper floors and two basement floors rests on a solid base faced in clinker brick using a wild bond pattern which picks up on and at the same time reinterprets the materiality and colours of the surrounding industrial buildings. The plinth follows the building boundary on the street side. The storeys above it are set back with an 15 degree rotation, allowing a view of the listed brewery buildings at the rear of the site. The roof of the plinth overlooking Saarbruecker Strasse fringes the upper storeys and has been designed as a spacious, partly planted terrace area. The façades of the first to fifth storeys above the plinth consist of sawtooth-like floor-to-ceiling windows in dark aluminium frames. The twisting of the upper storeys with differently orientated façade scaling and alternating large, two-storey bay windows makes the rotation of the upper part of the building even more eye-catching. The rotation and set back of the building volumes impart lightness and pay respect to the surrounding buildings by creating new visual axes. Depending on where the viewer stands, the historical façades across the street are reflected in the windows – a calculated optical interplay that allows the new building to appear as a harmonious component in the historical street front. Advantage has been taken of the upwardly sloping site to cut the ground floor of the building into the terrain by half a storey. In the direction of the courtyard this creates an open space which is partly overhung by the storeys above. Into this space the exposed vaulted rear side of the underground beer cellar has been integrated like a historical ruin. Two ground-floor conference rooms are orientated towards this special outdoor area. A further smaller courtyard is sunk into the plinth adjacent to the neighbouring building on Saarbruecker Strasse.