HAUSAUFGABEN

Berlin after 1989. The city with its East-West dual identity becomes a magnet for people who know how to use the unfinished as a working basis for their own projects. In the in-between of backyards and wastelands, people think less about the capital in the making and more about alternative varieties of modern urbanity. Frank Arnold and Mathias Gladisch are also concerned with what constitutes a metropolis and what task falls to architecture in this context. The two architects founded a joint office in 1996. With a feeling for changing building tasks, they were at the forefront when Berlin discovered the potential of its gaps, later rehabilitated the long reviled large housing estates, and at some point found a kind of European capital city normality. It is this development that is reflected in an almost exemplary way in the projects of Arnold and Gladisch Architekten. If nothing else, they show how a city grows from what it needs, enables and inspires in terms of architecture – and vice versa.

From the small individual projects from the early days, to the residential buildings for building groups, to large-scale projects for public and institutional clients, housing associations and investors – the HAUSAUFGABEN that Arnold and Gladisch Architekten have faced over the past 25 years have been solved with one firm conviction: each design must primarily relate to the respective site and find an individual form appropriate to the intended use.
Text: Reiner Nagel, Cornelia Dörries, Arnold und Gladisch Architekten