The Berlin “Voltair” building as a solution to building policy

Whatever works: With the “Voltair” building on Alexanderplatz, the Gordian knot of Berlin’s building policy is nonchalantly solved. The mantra of architect Jürgen Mayer H. is simplicity – which still appears elegant.

WWhen he enters the new headquarters of an internet bank on Berlin's Alexanderplatz, he sees young men in casual clothes playing table football while their colleagues hiss a bottled beer in the living room-like office landscape. The nonchalance of the new working world is an effect of the Corona crisis and the home office phenomenon and the chronic reluctance that the generation of digital natives is assumed to vegetate in irrelevant office floors every working day of their lives.

The planning history of the cheekily named “Voltair” office building on the “Banane” in which the bank has rented space is just as casual and ignorant. The area along Dircksenstrasse leads from the desolate Alexanderplatz in Berlin to the 1950s and 1960s prefabricated block of Friedrichshain. The urbanization of the wasteland was a pet project of the Stimmemann era and failed resoundingly: the mega-mall called “Alexa” – cast in pink concrete by the architects Ortner & Ortner – was not only voted Berlin's ugliest building, it is already the very tough one Development of the dreary Alexanderplatz is also particularly detrimental.