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Immediately behind the Brandenburg Gate lies
Pariser Platz (AR January 1999), the great
urban piazza that terminates the triumphal
axis of Unter den Linden. Before the War, it
was the grandest square in Berlin, site of the
American and French embassies, the Adlon
Hotel, the Akademie der Künste and blocks of
luxurious flats and offices. After the War and
the Wall, it was laid waste and became part of
Berlin’s deadly no-man’s land. Since German
reunification it has been rebuilt in an attempt
to emulate the spirit of its grand urban past,
with new embassies, hotels, and office blocks
slotted back into the original street pattern.
The rules of reconstruction, which stipulate
constraints such as eaves heights, proportions
and materials (obligatory stone cladding), do
not allow much scope for formal experiment.
The result is that Pariser Platz’s new
occupants resemble a collection of rather
bland, expensively dressed guests mingling
politely at an upmarket cocktail party. The
introduction of Frank Gehry into the mix
might in theory be calculated to induce an
element of raciness and unpredictability, but
he too has been obliged to conform to the
dress code. Being Gehry however, he has still
managed to spring a few surprises.

The genesis of the project dates back to

1995, when Gehry’s competition entry for
Berlin’s historic Museum Island was under
consideration. At that time, the DG Bank
invited him and six others to produce a
proposal for the bank’s new Berlin
headquarters. The brief included financial
offices, apartments and semi-autonomous
conference spaces that could be hired out to
corporate clients. Gehry did not prevail in the
museum competition, but his design for the
DG Bank won unanimous approval.

The site lies on the south side of the square,

in the middle of Pariser Platz’s evolving urban
jigsaw. The rectangular block is hemmed in on
its long sides by Behnisch’s new Akademie der
Künste and Moore Ruble Yudell’s American
Embassy, with the short ends overlooking
Pariser Platz and Behrenstrasse. The
organization of the new building is a logical
response to the constraints of site and brief.
A necklace of office spaces extends around
three sides of the perimeter, enclosing a huge
atrium space (of which more later). The
residential annexe, which has its own separate
entrance, is placed on the fourth side
overlooking Behrenstrasse and a site that will
eventually house the Memorial to the
Murdered Jews of Europe. Flats range in size

1
New DG Bank headquarters in the
shadow of the Brandenburg Gate.
2
Massive bank facade exudes an
austere monumentality that
conveys little sense of life within.
3
Breathtaking main atrium.

GEHRY’S GEODE

The new DG Bank headquarters in Berlin forms part of the wider and

ongoing reconstruction of Pariser Platz – but its urban sobriety hides a

rich inner life, animated by the interplay of light, form and materials.

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location plan

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from studios to larger maisonettes and are
separated from the offices by an elliptical void
enclosed by a swirling, shimmering glass wall
suspended from the roof that cascades down
to a pool below. Two glazed lifts glide up and
down through the void like air bubbles.

Gehry has clearly taken the Pariser Platz

dress code to heart; both bank and apartment
facades are models of sobriety and severity.
The apartment block is marginally less
austere, stepping back as it rises over 10
storeys with faceted bay windows like
concertinas animating the wall plane. But the
main bank facade overlooking Pariser Platz is
an utterly plain, utterly stripped down
composition of creamy buff limestone (to
match the Brandenburg Gate) and glass.
Openings are punched into the stone to
create deeply recessed windows that slide
back at the touch of a button to reveal
terraces enclosed by blade-like glass
balustrades. Clad in 4 inch thick stone, the

bank facade is almost as shocking in its solid,
rationalist monumentality as Gehry’s
signature sinuousness and its extreme weight
and abstraction only serve to show up the
flimsiness of the surrounding pastiche.
Ironically, in Berlin’s traumatized cityscape,
such solidity also embodies a reassuring sense
of permanence and institutional stability,
doubtless important concerns for Gehry’s
banker clients. (‘The bank guys loved it’, he
observed, ‘although it cost them a lot of
money to do it’.)

Sadly, most Berliners will never see beyond

this massive stone wall to the real drama and
spatial pyrotechnics within. Radically
upturning his expressive gestural vocabulary
and relocating it to the interior, Gehry has
had to pour his design into the cavity of the
perimeter block. Here, Californian ad-hocism
meets the European masterplan. The inside is
scooped out to form an immense atrium –
allegedly one of the largest in the world –

enclosed by a delicate steel and glass lattice,
improbably morphed and warped to form a
barrel-vaulted roof canopy that curves in two
directions. Within the atrium is a free-
standing structure like a giant horse’s head
rearing and writhing through the space.
Encased in a thin skin of stainless steel, this
extraordinary object contains a conference
chamber. The inner surface is lined with strips
of red oak (finely perforated for acoustic
reasons), so being inside the chamber is like
being cocooned inside a contorted ship’s hull.
The regimented orthogonality of the exterior
extends to the perimeter offices, which are
edged by a series of arcades lined with red-
oak veneer. From these vantage points, the
squirming biological specimen of the
conference chamber can be fully appreciated.

Beneath the shell of the chamber is a

basement level containing a lecture theatre,
along with the bank’s cafeteria and a large
foyer; these can be combined to create a

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Offices are arranged around perimeter,
overlooking a writhing horse’s head
conference chamber and glass roof enclosing
staff cafeteria at lower ground level.
8
Staff cafeteria, which can also be used as a
banqueting and meeting space.
9
Clad in a thin skin of burnished steel, the
conference chamber appears to float in
the vast space.
10
Seductive play of form and materials.

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Rippling concertina facade of the apartment
block steps back as it rises.
5
Windows are punched deep into the bank wall.
Blade-like glass balustrades enclose terraces.
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Atrium is framed by a gridded arcade.

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longitudinal section

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Inside warped hull of conference chamber.

cross section

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lower ground floor plan

ground floor plan (scale approx 1:1000)

first floor plan

fourth floor plan

fifth floor plan

ninth floor plan

1

staff cafeteria

2

executive dining

3

kitchen

4

foyer

5

lecture theatre

6

ramp to parking below

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bank entrance

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bank offices

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conference chamber

10 apartments entrance
11 lift lobby
12 apartments

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generous space suitable for banquets and
meetings. Another warped glass canopy,
smaller cousin to the main roof, encloses
these spaces allowing light to percolate down
to the lower levels. (During the course of site
excavations Albert Speer’s bunker was
discovered, but no trace of it now remains.)

As with Gehry’s other projects, the

translation of initial ideas to built form is
achieved through a design and construction
process that combines sophisticated
computer software programs with a craft
approach to building. Initial generative
sketches, which defy conventional logic and
geometry, must be painstakingly interpreted
as a precise system of co-ordinates and
known structural and material properties.
Gehry develops his ideas slowly, from rough
drawings through an exhaustive series of
handmade models. Using the Catia program
to represent complex three-dimensional
objects, these crude wood and cardboard
mock-ups are scanned into the computer and
digitally translated back into working models
and drawings. Employed as an instrument of
translation rather than generative device, the
computer enables the representation and

manipulation of that which cannot otherwise
be drawn. In this case, unusually, the exterior
presented no such challenges, but the glass
roofs and conference chamber proved tests of
design and manufacturing ingenuity. The
triangulated space frame of the roof is made
up of solid stainless steel rods that form six
pointed stars screwed into nodal connectors.
The complex geometry of the roof meant that
the rods meet at different angles, so to match
them precisely, the nodal connectors were
cut from 70mm-thick stainless steel plate by
computer-controlled milling machines. The
frame is infilled by 1500 triangular glazing
panels bedded on neoprene gaskets. The
conference chamber is clad in a 2mm skin of
brushed stainless steel plates (basic
dimensions 2m x 4m) stretched and fashioned
by skilled boatbuilders to accommodate the
conflation of complex, bulbous forms.

Superficially, this might well appear a

conservative building, but clearly it is anything
but. In the extreme and startling contrast
between its outer and inner life, it resembles
some kind of weird rock or geode that, split
open, reveals a spectacular mineral formation.
It is tempting to see the entire exercise as a

metaphor for Berlin – beneath the haughty
Prussian exterior lies decadence and
debauchery – but after all it is only a bank and
the morphological conspicuousness of the
conference spaces is perhaps as much to do
with commercial viability as being vehicles of
architectural imagination. Yet in the decorous
context of Pariser Platz, it is definitely one of
the more unorthodox and welcome guests.

CATHERINE SLESSOR

Architect

Gehry Partners, Santa Monica, USA

Project team

Frank O. Gehry, Randy Jefferson, Craig Webb, Marc Salette,

Tensho Takemori, Laurence Tighe, Eva Sobesky,

George Metzger, Jim Dayton, John Goldsmith, Jorg Ruegemer,

Scott Uriu, Jeff Guga, Michael Jobes, Kirk Blaschke,

Nida Chesonis, Tom Cody, Leigh Jerrard, Tadao Shimizu,

Rick Smith, Bruce Shepard

Associate architect

Planungs AG – Neufert Mittmann Graf

Structural engineers

Ingenieur Büro Müller Marl

Schlaich Bergermann & Partner

Services engineer

Brandi Ingenieure

Facade consultant

Planungsbüro für Ingenieurleistungen

Photographs

All photographs by Christian Richters apart from 1 and 5

which are by Waltraud Krase

12
Glazed wall of conference chamber.
13
Curving steel and glass lattice of barrel-
vaulted roof gracefully encloses atrium.
14
Apartment block is arranged around an
elliptical void.

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