Berlin’s New Timber Tower Comes With Lofty Ambitions
A skyscraper that would be Europe’s tallest wooden building promises a “social and ecological paradigm shift” in a gentrifying neighborhood — and a test for the city’s affordable housing model.
The high-rise mixed-use building that Berlin is planning to construct in the city’s Kreuzberg district is unusual for a few reasons.
The 322 foot (98 meter) tower, whose construction was confirmed on Jan. 29 by sustainable developer UTB, the state of Berlin and the borough of Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg the will be made largely of wood. Costing 90 million euros ($109 million) to build, the tower will be constructed from the engineered wood known as cross-laminated timber, which allows builders to erect tall towers that use far less steel and concrete than traditional skyscrapers. Called WoHo and designed by Norway’s Mad Arkitekter, the 29-story building promises to be Europe’s highest wooden building to date, using reinforced concrete solely for its core and basement.
While the project’s eco-friendly engineering is attracting attention, the complex has other qualities that may be even more interesting. That’s because the tower, and the connected lower-rise buildings that will surround it, aspire to be an emphatically community-focused, affordable development. UTB chief Thomas Bestgen has called it the “Anti-Amazon Tower,” referring to the controversial commercial office building that the online retail giant is erecting in eastern Berlin.
If the project lives up to the progressive aspirations declared by the developer and city, WoHo — whose name stands for Wohnhochhaus, or “live-tower” — could serve as a template for how to build a charismatic architectural showpiece in an up-and-coming neighborhood without exclusion or displacement. Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg officials say the goal is not just to provide new housing: It is to direct Berlin, and other cities, “towards a social and ecological paradigm shift,” Kreuzberg housing commissioner Florian Schmidt said in a press release from the state of Berlin.
To that end, the project is built around serving a broad mix of Berliners. Some 25% of the tower will be commercial office and retail space — with preference given to local businesses — 60% will be homes. One third of these homes will be affordable co-operative housing, one third will be market-rate owner-occupied units, and one third will be rent-controlled apartments — overriding the law that exempts new construction from Berlin’s current city-wide rent freeze. Multiple types of housing will be intermingled within the complex, creating a diverse vertical neighborhood of large family units, student studios and assisted living for older residents and people with dementia. There will even be a small cohort of “joker rooms” — referring to the wild card in a deck of cards — designed to be adapted to unanticipated short-term uses. The remaining 15% of the tower’s space, meanwhile, will be allotted to public uses, including a kindergarten and an after-school club, workshops, an indoor play area and a panoramic rooftop with a public café and a sauna open to the general public.
What WoHo won’t have a lot of, however, is parking. Space for private cars will be stripped to a minimum, replaced by bike racks, electric vehicle charging stations and spots for shared vehicles. Pre-construction design renderings (always an unreliable gauge of a development’s ultimate character) show balconies and roofs decked with creeping greenery, a feature that would integrate the tower nicely into its location at the end of a recently replanted, very popular spine of green parkland heading out of central Berlin along old rail tracks.
The fact that the building plans combine height and some degree of social mission is no coincidence. WoHo’s diverse character reflects new guidelines around high-rise buildings adopted by the state of Berlin in February 2020 — after the Amazon Tower had already been approved. Berlin’s “high-rise model" states that if a developer wants to construct a building that rises more than one-and-a-half times higher than the general roofline of the surrounding area, approval will only be granted if the project is “of high architectural quality and functionally sustainable.” In other words, you can only go tall if it looks good and doesn’t ratchet up the city’s greenhouse emissions.
While WoHo will be the first building constructed by UTB under the the city’s high-rise model, the developer has already made a name constructing mixed-use buildings that combine market-rate condominiums with affordable housing. They have largely been able to do this while maintaining profitability by offering lower-than-average rates of return to investors, who are prepared to fund a project that will not necessarily gain the highest returns possible, suggests UTB.
Such a forward-looking approach aligns with the term that often accompanies green building projects in Germany — zukunftsfähig, which means both sustainable and “future-oriented.” But in certain ways, WoHo is not so much breaking new ground as harking back to Kreuzberg’s past. A working-class ex-industrial neighborhood urbanized in the late 19th century, the area’s tenements are known in Berlin for their so-called “Kreuzberg mix.” Unusually in the city, these building complexes originally mixed homes in their front courtyards — the better ones facing the street — with workshops and even small factories at the back. Mixing uses and income levels within one complex may have made these complexes noisy and dirty during the steam age, but this feature of the neighborhood’s bedrock has been much appreciated since the later 20th century.
That diverse social mix has still taken quite a hammering in recent years. Kreuzberg still contains some of Berlin’s poorest areas, but the cost of market-rate apartments in its good-looking old tenements has risen sharply, leading to widespread displacement of both long-term residents and established businesses. The borough, governed by a Green Party-led center-left coalition, has become well-known in recent years for its attempts to rein in this process.
Adopting a legal right-of-first-refusal, the borough’s housing commissioner Florian Schmidt has taken to buying buildings for sale that are deemed to be at risk of sharp rent increases, or using the threat of buying them to make landlords sign contracts agreeing to raise rents only by inflation for 25 years. Between 2016 and 2019 alone, the borough bought 15 buildings outright; in 25 more, landlords agreed to rent freezes. (This has also placed Schmidt under some scrutiny: His office is due to be the subject of an enquiry after allegations that the policy stretched the law and overexposed the public purse to risk.)
Now the borough could face controversy of a different sort. While a complex in WoHo’s chosen location is not completely out of place — it stands a few minutes walk from the office blocks and malls of Potsdamer Platz, just beyond the borough’s boundary — it will partly overshadow some nearby homes and tower over an area mainly built to 19th century heights. Some residents say their complaints about this have been ignored by the borough. Others, meanwhile, fear that the tower’s affordability aspirations will be diluted, leaving the area with a private tower whose amenities are out of reach for many members of the community below. With the project just approved, WoHo’s progress stands to be closely watched.
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