UP! Berlin by Jasper Architects transforms a former department store into a transparent new office space for the digital era

Berlin, Germany

Jasper Architects’ light-flooded, flexible design for the new offices of SIGNA in Berlin facilitates new forms of productivity, creativity, and community.

Back in 2016 Martin Jasper and his team at Jasper Architects submitted the winning design for the competition organized by Signa, for an overall transformation of the former department store, Centrum Warenhaus, completed in 1979.

The competition task was to present a concept to turn this massive, squared building block of 80 by 80 meters and 67,000 square meters into an office space for the digital era—a new chapter for an icon of Berlin's history.

SIGNA commissioned Jasper Architects in a planning partnership with Gebers & Pudewill GmbH for the general planning of the renovation, and the building was completed in March 2021.

UP! Berlin has recently been awarded a 2022 International Architecture Award by The Chicago Athenaeum: Museum of Architecture and Design and The European Centre for Architecture Art Design and Urban Studies.

The department store was originally conceived as an introverted building without openings. That principle had to be reversed as natural lighting was a major challenge.

The idea presented by Jasper Architects was to cut out triangular-shaped prisms on each side of the squared building to flood the interior with natural light and in this way, break up the massive monolithic geometry.

The floorspace lost with this intervention was regained by two floors added to the top of the existing structure, plus a roof pavilion, and an extensive rooftop terrace.

The resulting ‘voids’ redefine the building's urban presence entirely. The project thus both reveals the building's past and points to the future with a new, entirely glazed envelope.

The dimensions of UP! Berlin were all too familiar for the architects: the existing building looked like a monolithic extrusion of a typical city block of Buenos Aires.

A typology that continues to confront the architects with one main challenge: how is the provision of natural lighting dealt with?

Cuts of all sizes and forms are made into the urban mass and urban planning regulations of different times overlap, which create complex urban geometries that always arise from the same squared base of the city block.

For the architects, this was an inspiration for the proposal for the project.

As a first step, the building was gutted; the entire existing facade was removed, and the building block was reduced to its concrete skeleton.

With huge circular saws, the voids were cut out of the old structure. What remained was a regular grid of concrete columns and four empty cores.

Parts of the history of the building were uncovered: the patina of decades of history became visible; old technical infrastructure and rusty traces became visible and were kept in place.

The rough, industrial charm became a canvas for the new.

The facade is composed of fully glazed and opaque modules with integrated casements, distributed in a ratio of three to one in order to provide the necessary amount of shade for sunlight regulation.

In the voids, glass doors give access to the terraces.

The old skeleton is revealed to passers-by behind the new glazed envelope, and from the inside, the urban environment can be experienced as a full panorama view from all levels.

Meeting room boxes and translucent cast-glass walls were distributed strategically together with a flooring color concept by Studio Aisslinger's.

What was once an interior-focused shopping center has been reimagined as an outwardly focused center for productivity, creativity, and community.

Project: UP! BerlinArchitects: Jasper ArchitectsHead of Design: Martin JasperAssociate Architects: Gewers & Pudewill GmbHGeneral Planning Lead: Martin Jasper, Joerg Westphal, Henry Pudewill, Alexander Mendelsohn, and Georg GewersFaçade Design Team: Tobias Becker and Dennis TruttyPlanning Team: Lene Nettelbeck, Sara Staschiok, Nabil Rajjoub, Andre Flaskamp, Andrey Yordanov, Hanui Sori You, Astrid Pudszuhn, Simon Lindenberg, Santiago Flagel, Charly Alazraki, Miriam Herwald, and Nik WenzkeInterior Design: Studio Aisslinger and JASPER ARCHITECTSGeneral Contractors: KoHa Bauausführungen und Immobilien GmbH and Rupert App GmbH & Co. Stahl- und MetallbauClient: SIGNA Real Estate Management Germany GmbHRenderings: Jasper ArchitectsPhotographers: HG Esch, Nils Koenning, and Robert Herrmann