While collaborating with Renzo Piano Building Workshop in Paris, Grace Ong Yan contributed to the design of Daimler Benz headquarters at Potsdamer Platz in Berlin, Germany.
RPBW had won an international design competition for the urban design of Potsdamer Platz in Berlin, an important public space with much historical significance. It had been, in the late nineteenth century, a bustling traffic intersection. In World War II, it was completely bombed out and left desolate during the Cold War era when the Berlin Wall bisected its former location. Since German reunification, Potsdamer Platz has been the site of extensive redevelopment.
The firm designed a number of the buildings in the renewal of Potsdamer Platz, including the Daimler Benz headquarters. Terra-cotta and glass were mediums for variation, offering a material concept for architecture. A large office building was give human scale through material articulation. Terra cotta bricks were systematized into a kit of parts. This methodology is one that Renzo Piano Building Workshop has built upon serially through many built works.
At one end of the building, material density of terra cotta is explored, while at the other, density of glass is investigated. In the study model (built by Grace Ong Yan) glass is articulated as a layered plane expressing the verticality of the highest point of the building. Mies van der Rohe’s 1921 Friedrichstrasse Skyscraper Project in Berlin was considered in designing the Daimler-Benz headquarters.
