Reichstag Visitor Centre
The BIZ is integrated into the Tiergarten, as a pavilion 'of its own' that blends into the natural environment of the park, but it does so without renouncing its architectural status, like other formidable architecture on the edges of the Tiergarten, such as the Hansaviertel, the Phillarmoniem, and the Neue Wache and the displaced Siegeseule. The BIZ paradoxically attends to the deep traces of the surrounding buildings - the Kanzlerei, the Reichstag and the Sowjetisches Ehrenmal Tiergarten - that demand a clear architectural intervention, but at the same time, it attends to the magical condition of the Tiergarten that calls for a subtle, elusive or diffuse action.
The BIZ has an emphatic and precise volume, an easily legible deformed polygon, but its materiality is elusive, nuanced with transparencies and 'reflections'. Sometimes it reflects the park or takes on the color of the sky, other times it shows its interior. It is an architectural materialization of the aesthetics of dissolution and camouflage. It hides among the trees of the Tiergarten going largely unnoticed with facades of diffuse grayish tones that blend in with the sky and with reflective elements that duplicate the atmosphere and landscape of the Tiergarten. Its polygonal plan allows it to relate in different ways with the exterior, with the Platz der Republik, with the yew hedges of the Sowjetisches Denkmal, with the alignments of lime trees of the Simsonweg, or with the tree-lined square between the two roads.
If the exterior manifestation of the BIZ is a consequence of the delicate and expressionistic relationship with the site, its spatial organization is an expression of its skeletal structure. It rises from the center with two large pylons - which contain the vertical circulations - and support a grid of large-edged concrete beams tied around its perimeter. This load-bearing structure qualifies the interior of the main space, the foyer, which, illuminated from above, shows the rhythm of light and shadow of a powerful structure.
The BIZ has a precise functioning linked to the order of its circulations and the adequacy of the public spaces to them. The spatial scheme is simple: dense spaces and fluid spaces alternate in a sort of new poché to delimit masses and voids in a simple way, making public and private uses coexist with the application of the server-served scheme.
The project is constituted through the surreal addition of fragments in the manner of a collage. Each fragment responds to the conditions of the environment, building a 'scene'. The sequence of scenes constructs multiple visual narratives, which have to do with the viewer and his or her point of view in movement. The scenes could be interchanged as the repetitive geometric structure that holds them dimensionally is universal and flexible. The BIZ stands as a transgressive and anti-monumental paradigm, accepting its subaltern status to the Reichstag.
