Something’s Brewing

Mairi Beautyman -- Interior Design, 3/1/2010 12:00:00 AM

firm: zweidrei medienarchitektur
site: berlin

For six weeks, 40 thinkers from around the world—mostly designers and journalists selected from a pool of 600 applicants—gathered in Berlin to ponder one lofty topic: the future of the workplace. A nonprofit collaborative, Palomar5, organized the event, during which participants not only worked but also lived at Malzfabrik, a 1917 brewery more recently used as gallery and event space.

Most of the thinking at the workshop occurred inside an angular, crisscrossing white installation that seemed to explode from the redbrick building’s three-story atrium. “We took the atrium’s measurements and extruded them to create this open, deconstructed form. It’s not a void, in other words the absence of creativity, but a physical construction representing the Palomar5 idea of deep thinking,” ZweiDrei Medienarchitektur principal Julius Kranefuss explains of the three painted MDF structures that framed the 4,300-square-foot brainstorming zone.

Participants who weren’t deep in thought could sometimes be found sleeping in a “village” of 40 boxes inspired by Le Corbusier’s Dominican priory, Sainte-Marie de la Tourette in France. Designed with the interiors firm 45 Kilo, the boxes each contained a built-in single bed, a wardrobe, and a reading lamp. For privacy, doors slid across the front, and shades rolled down. Participants in a more social mood could kick back amid the secondhand furniture of a lounge where, at the workshop’s end, they did some literal deconstruction: tearing down the cardboard and spruce slats of the ceiling and stomping it to pieces.

Photography by Rosa Merk.

PROJECT TEAM: nils krämer; simon wind