New Green tower coming to Berlin

Preibisz and Sandhaus were most concerned with providing an alternative to the industrial food complex and fostering a sense of community in a typically anonymous urban landscape. And so the proposed tower is designed to have a network of gardens that fit into the figure 8′s two hollow parts. The resident quarters are arranged to encourage interaction and community-building, which Preibisz and Sandhaus compare to social networking, where the “the border between the public and the private spheres is being renegotiated.”

"The state of society in the twenty-first century requires that we develop new visions for living in densely populated inner cities," Preibisz told the design magazine Dezeen. "This process inherently triggers an essential confrontation of material and social values, and so there is a nascent yearning for an architecture that offers a high degree of potential for community."

“Current trends towards a 'sharing-spirit' and a new participation in the community life counteract the anonymity and isolation in the metropolis”, writes Sandhaus in the projects presentation. “While in social networking, the border between the public and the private spheres is being renegotiated, architecture and urban planning of cities such as Berlin lags behind these significant social and demographic changes. The unease with the global imperative of continued growth propagated by financial markets, seems to be spreading. Confidence in industrial food production finds itself nowadays significantly eroded. At the same time also the mass production of organic and healthier food has its limits and fails to appease growing groups of customers”.

The Green8 is has an interesting design in terms of functionality. Not serving solely as a huge green house, it offers in the lower level of the building a space for farmers market. In the level above will accommodate the resident’s offices and workshops space. The top floors will be again dedicated to social needs, including a kindergarten, an elderly care, a boarding house, a home cooking restaurant and a 360 degrees panorama health spa pool bar.

Currently, “the question of whether it is going to be built is open as of this moment,” says Sandhaus. But if it is built, Green8 will be cooperatively owned, side-stepping typical developer profiteering and land speculation. The architects are in the process of finding a cooperative of potential owners and are talking with engineers about the tower’s feasibility.