A multi-species habitat is created in a winter garden house in Berlin

supertype group extended a historic building with an open, hybrid structure, where living and garden spaces can be inserted and combined as plug-in modules.

The project by Berlin-based collective Supertype Group looks like one of those concepts imagined in the days of Aldo Van Eyck to inhabit the “realm of the in-between”. Only this time the ‘in-between’ is much more solid than those spaces made up of social relations born on the thresholds of houses, which then had to be given materiality: in the case of the Winter Garden House, the in-between space is a typical feature of the residential fabric of Pankow, in the north of Berlin; it is the abundant space that separates the various late nineteenth-century Wilhelminian-style buildings, the space where small manufacturing activities used to stand and where green spaces now open up for residential use.

supertype group, Winter Garden House, Berlin. Photo Marina Hoppmann

In one of these areas, a historical building has been extended through what the designers define as a new building type: a parasitic greenhouse, a spatial structure made of wood covered with translucent polycarbonate, with an open and regular matrix, in which modules can be installed at will, closed and thermally insulated, to act as rooms for the house, or can be left empty and combined to form a thermal buffer zone – a winter garden, in fact – where animals, plants and other companion species can coexist in a state of comfort throughout the seasons.

Architectural language, then, is the language of technical aesthetics, which comes from the light-toned wood of the structure, the metal and polycarbonate of the cladding, all of which is then systematized by the ever-present green of the plants and the lemon yellow of a staircase running all through the voids.

The time factor, at all possible scales, is crucial to this project and to its role in the environment: over the year, the living garden mitigates both the cold of winter and the heat of summer; over the long term, different living needs may lead to the choice of closing or opening different modules of the structure. Moreover, this is achieved using only screwed elements that do not require sealing or gluing, a detail that greatly influences the entire life cycle of the structure, including its eventual dismantling and disposal. All of these solutions have the immediate and long-term effect of reducing the building’s carbon footprint.

Design team:
supertype group (Max Becker, Pia Brückner, Tobias Schrammek)
Structural engineering:
bls engineer (Wataru Furuya)

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