Exploring Berlin comes to a halt for a few days! It’s time to get to work with the Technical University of Berlin students. We presented our stormwater case studies to the students and received nice feedback from the professor.
For our next project, we were put to the task to come up with stormwater design for RBB Berlin’s radio station building site. We went to the site to complete our initial site analysis and then the next day we went back with the TUB students to collect more data consisting of where the existing trees were, how many existing electrical posts, how many existing garbage cans and benches, how water is flowing on site, where the drains are, look for gutters on the buildings, look for curb cuts, how much impervious pavement and so on.
For the following week we began to form concepts on proposed stormwater design ideas. The site consisted of a lot of impervious pavement, which leads to a lot of stormwater runoff. The seating areas for workers were unwelcoming, and there was no reuse of water existing on the site.
For my groups design concept, we focused on incorporating sound waves into the landscape. Thinking about the historic background of the building, we thought it would be a really strong idea to bring in the shape of a sound wave onto the ground plane, but also play with it on the horizontal and vertical planes as well.
In the end the project had an integrated green and grey system where water could flow through out the middle of the site and down to the lowest point of the site where there would be fountains and seating for workers and visitors during the dry weather. During the wet weather, scuppers(open face gutter that carry water off the roof) and green rain walls carry the water from the roofs of buildings and create sound as the water flows down into the vegetated catch basin.
The main goal behind the design was to not only have that strong sound wave connection site from one end to the other, but also to create moments for workers and visitors to experience the sound, have their own space, and enjoy the water/vegetation on site.
Overall, the three day charrette went really well. We got to work with the german students and saw that they are definitely more conceptual when thinking about design, where as we are way more technical and like to think about all of the detail of the site. Plus, we got to celebrate with a german beer after a short 30hrs of intense design work.
Leave a Reply