Maximilianstrasse
"Die Maxi" is an Apartment Building in the heart of Berlin, built up of single-floor apartments as well as maisonettes, offering a home for many different users with different demands. All the flats are connected with the garden or have an private access to a balcony. The inhabitants enter their apartments via access balcony, that represents the first transition between public and private space. This space could be used as an extension of the housing space or as meeting point for the neighborhood.
Postmodernism holds a top position in the hit list of overrated things - not only because the word itself is quite hideous. It is also partly because this matter of irony, indeed an essential element of postmodernism, never really struck. In architecture, postmodernism primarily meant: to simply put a pillar somewhere, haha. Of course, this apartment building in Maximilianstrasse doesn’t have a single pillar, nowhere. Because it primarily answers its inhabitants’ simple, smartest question, that is: How do I want to live? For example like this. Or like this. Or like this. In a single-floor apartment. In a maisonette. With a garden or with a terrace. Options arise despite the designs’ strict precision. The architecture provides offers without ingratiating itself. How this works? As with all other questions, Michel Foucault, who opposed himself being categorised as a postmodern philosopher, knows the answer here. Instead, he demanded to stay ‘as close as possible’ to the question of the nature of reason and the acceptance of a ‘revolving door of rationality’, for it was incorrect to assume that ‘rationality is the enemy we need to eradicate’. Reason can indeed also be a house like this.
