07Personal Project

An der Urania

LocationBerlin, Germany

Year2024

TypeSpeculative Reconstruction

Interior render of the ground-level vertical farming laboratory, researchers and a robot arm working beside racks of crops

Description

An der Urania reimagines the site of a demolished Werner Düttmann highrise at Urania 4–10 in Berlin — property of the State of Berlin, taken down in the summer of 2024 — as a speculative prototype for a city under pressure from housing shortage and climate change.

The proposal keeps the building's original structural grid and load-bearing walls, and reintroduces the tower as a mixed-use vertical farm: glazed vertical-farming volumes bring food production directly into the building, alongside modular residential pods that plug into the existing frame.

Vertical FarmingAdaptive ReuseSpeculative DesignModular Housing

Urban context diagram for An der Urania, mapping climate, housing and technology drivers across Berlin

Render of the vertical farming walkway between glazed greenhouse volumes at An der Urania

Full section through the vertical farming and housing tower

Aerial axonometric of the tower with a Level 9 floor plan showing vertical farming and housing units

Interior corridor render alongside a Level 2 floor plan

Ground floor plan showing library, community centres, café and restaurant

Vertical farming axonometrics and long section through the growing volumes

Design Strategy

A Framework for Reuse, Not a Clean Slate

At ground level, the project keeps a public, communal programme — library, community centres, café, restaurant and outdoor space — organised around a central circulation core, while upper floors alternate between vertical-farming volumes and modular housing units that attach to the retained structural grid.

The vertical farms use hydroponic and aeroponic growing systems with sensor-based monitoring to manage crops with minimal water and land, treating the existing concrete structure as infrastructure for a food-producing building rather than starting from a cleared site.

The project is a personal, speculative study rather than a commissioned work — an argument for treating demolition as a last resort, and for what an existing structure can become when reconstruction is understood broadly.