One of my developer friends — who I would say has similar design tastes to my own — once said to me, "If I like it [the design], I often assume that the general public won't." What he was getting at is that architects and designers often appreciate buildings and spaces for different reasons.

For us (if I can say this without the OAA sending me another legal letter), it is often about things like the intellectual rigour behind the work, the "honesty" of the materials, and the greater social and historic context, rather than just "this has nice curb appeal."

So with that, I'm now going to go out on a limb and suggest that these converted industrial towers in former East Berlin fall into the category of "probably not for everyone." Built in the 1950s by the German Democratic Republic (GDR) to process graphite, and later abandoned after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the property was eventually privatized in the 1990s to raise money for the state.

Then, between 2018 and 2021, architecture practice b+ — which has made a name for itself transforming old Brutalist buildings into super cool live-work spaces — reworked the interiors to create a workshop for itself.

The two industrial towers are 37.2 and 42.6 metres tall. And since their volumes reminded architect Arno Brandlhuber of the towers of San Gimignano, that became the project's name. The site area is 960 sqm, the usable floor area is around 300 sqm, and the entire property is for sale for €1,700,000. There's also future development potential!

I personally love the project. If Globizen were to have an office in Berlin, I'd want it to be here. But hey, what do you think?

Photos by Future Documentation

This is a beautiful apartment building in the center of Palma. Brutalist ground floor. Operable wooden slats up the rest of the facade. It feels right at home in this climate. It's also a passive-energy building that uses 90% less energy compared to a "conventional" apartment building. The technical classification is nZEB (or a nearly zero energy building). It's pretty amazing that with only 9 apartments, these kinds of projects pencil here. Perhaps it's no surprise that it's also a single-stair building.

The architect is OHLAB. For more information, here's their website.

If you're an architect, you're sort of expected to have a somewhat eccentric home (or at least a really cool home). And that was certainly the case for architect Paul Rudolph. Paul is perhaps best known -- at least in my mind -- for being the chair of Yale's architecture program and for designing its Brutalist building. But he also designed himself a pretty interesting apartment. In 1976, he bought the 19th-century townhouse at 23 Beekman Place in New York. He then constructed himself a now historically-landmarked penthouse on top of it. Now, technically, it is four levels. But spatially, it's more like a series of connected platforms -- 27 of them to be exact. So the penthouse is often described as being 27 levels, and as not having any doors and walls. Because those are totally overrated. I joke, but it's a beautiful and interesting space. And the two founders of New York's Gachot (and their two teenage boys) recently got a chance to live in it for three years. If you'd like to hear and see what that was like, click here.

Photo: Sight Unseen