Berlin
Foster and Partners

With the Free University Library in Berlin, Foster and Partners inserts a radically new element into an iconic Modern campus while respecting the context 

	Photo © Reinhard Görner

By Clifford A. Pearson

Students at Berlin Free University have nicknamed it “the Brain,” an apt reference both to its function and its plan. The intellectual nexus of a dense network of linked buildings, the new library of the faculty of philology indeed looks like a cranium when viewed from above. More important, it’s a smart building that employs a range of green design strategies and state-of-the-art digital technologies for connecting people with information.

Designed by Foster and Partners, the library is the most prominent element in the firm’s renovation of the Free University campus, a seminal work by the firm Candilis, Josic, Woods, Schiedhelm that embodied many of the ideas of the group of architects known as Team 10. Beginning 1956, this group brought together designers and polemicists, such as Georges Candilis, Shadrach Woods, and Peter and Alison Smithson, who wanted to reform the Congrès Internationaux d’Architecture Moderne. Candilis, Josic, Woods, Schiedhelm, which started designing Free University in 1963 and saw the project’s first phase completed in 1973, dismissed as old-fashioned the notion of assembling the campus as a series of object buildings. Instead, it envisioned its design—a sprawling grid of courtyards and connector buildings—as a system of urbanism that would expand and change as needed. Such a system would provide flexible growth, allowing entire blocks of the campus to be dismantled and put up somewhere else. The buildings’ innovative cladding panels, made of Cor-Ten steel, were designed by Jean Prouvé, who used Le Corbusier’s Modulor system to devise their proportions. Unfortunately, the Cor-Ten rusted through the thin panels, compromising their performance.

With the library, the challenge for Foster was to somehow insert a 68,000-square-foot building within Candilis, Josic, Woods, Schiedhelm’s dense campus fabric without overwhelming it. Pursuing such a strategy, the architects developed a curving building envelope oval in plan and blimplike in its long elevation. To make room for the new building, which houses 700,000 books and consolidates 11 departmental libraries that had been scattered throughout the campus, the architects combined six courtyards by taking down the buildings separating them.

By inserting a round building within an emphatically rectilinear, matlike context, Foster and Partners risked sticking out like a “carbuncle on the face of a much-loved and elegant friend.” But the library comes across as one of those wonderful surprises you might find just beyond a lively piazza in some Tuscan hill town.

Want the full story? Read the entire article in our November 2006 issue.
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the People Architect: Foster and Partners Project team: Norman Foster, David Nelson, Stefan Behling, Christian Hallmann, Ulrich Hamann, Ingo Pott, Engineers Structural: Pichler Ingenieure Mechanical, Electrical: Schmidt Reuter Partner, PIN Ingenieure Facade: FFT Karlotto Schott Consultants Planning, library: Kappes Scholtz Building physicist: Büro Langkau Arnsberg General contractors Shell: MERO-TSK Core: Glass Ingenieurbau Leipzig

the Products Aluminum-skin panels: MERO Glass-fiber membrane: Clauss Markisen Projekt Carpeting: Anker-Teppichboden Desk light: Kotzolt-Leuchten (Stretchlite) Wall washers: ERCO Leuchten Lounge chairs: Patrick Norguent for Minimum Einrichten Desk chairs: Egon Eiermann for Wilde+Spieth