Haus der Zukunft Berlin

Berlin, Germany, 2012

Adjacent to the new building for the German Ministry of Education and Research , this competition – ambitiously called Haus der Zukunft (“House of the Future”) – called for a building to showcase the innovative powers’ designs for and of tomorrow’s life.

Arguably one of the brief’s strongest points was the sense of uncertainty it conveyed, the clever admission that the future was not a projectable piece of fixedness. Rather than a building, FBA proposed a place where the city seamlessly continues into an open urban landscape of ever-changing usages.

FBA’s proposal is an architectural framework allowing a diversity of likely and unforeseeable scenarios to become part of the urban surroundings. Its high transparency towards the outside continuous in an oblique world of discoveries inside.

The spatial complexity is based on a simple manoeuvre: The site’s triangle is sliced open at its centroid, the resultant edge pulled up and connected with an edge of a similar sliced piece on top. The space that results when repeating this process opens up a continuous inside of exhibition and gallery, event and office spaces.

What seem to be slopes are in reality close to horizontal inclined planes which, because of the architecture’s generous scale, create ways of shared access and circulation for all. And yet, in spaces that defy the comfort of the customary, the future’s uncertainty is always present.

The House of the Future, as an architecture open to absorb and collect from all sides, with no clear or prescribed path but a myriad of possible discoveries, is in itself a diagram of the future.