I recently came across this for-sale listing from Fantastic Frank for a 3-room apartment in Berlin's new Am Tacheles district. Naturally, I thought to myself, "Hey, this is a beautiful apartment — now let me go all the way back to the beginning of the 20th century and better understand the history of the development site."
Am Tacheles has been called the most controversial real estate project in Berlin's modern history. Previously developed in 1908 as a high-end shopping arcade intended to rival the great galleries of Paris, the Friedrichstraßenpassage, as it was known, was an ambitious undertaking located in the city's historic Jewish quarter.
But only about six months after opening, the project went bankrupt. The existing building then went on to live numerous lives, ranging from an AEG showroom to a building used to house French war prisoners, before ultimately being co-opted by artists in 1990 as a way to save it from demolition.
It was at this point that it was given the name Tacheles, which is a Yiddish word meaning "to speak straight." Supposedly, this was a reference to the area's history as a thriving Jewish quarter and a message about political honesty (it is located in the former East Berlin, where that wasn't a thing).
For the next two decades, the site became a global symbol of Berlin's "poor but sexy" identity. The ownership vacuum created by the fall of the Berlin Wall meant that nobody really knew who owned what. This was a disaster for clear property rights and capital investment, but fortuitous for squatters who needed cheap (okay, free) space to experiment with art and techno music.
In my view, this was ultimately a net positive for the city. It created an urban vitality that nobody could have predicted, demonstrating the potential of people and cities when allowed to experiment and take risks.
But then, basically, two things happened: (1) people eventually figured out who owned what, and (2) the development potential of the site became increasingly valuable. This is the quintessential urban cycle. First, the artists and creatives come in to take advantage of cheap space. They then make the area cool. And then developers like me come in to monetize it, completing the cycle.
Fast forward to today, and Am Tacheles (they kept the name) is a new master-planned community designed by Swiss architects Herzog & de Meuron and one of the most desirable (and thus expensive) areas in Berlin. It's also quite a bit tidier there these days, though they did preserve some of the graffiti.
Returning to our 3-room apartment listing, the asking price is €1,825,000 + €90,000 (for what I believe is a parking space). At 113 sqm, this works out to ~€16,947 per sqm or about C$2,529 per sqft (for comparison to Toronto prices). As I understand it, this is well above the average new construction home prices in the area and city.
What is clear is that Berlin is no longer poor. It's global-city rich. But is it still sexy?
Cover photo and floor from Fantastic Frank
Historic Tacheles photo via Wikipedia
Am Tacheless photo and stairwell section from H&dM
I've only been to Berlin once. It was for a long weekend in 2007; one where my friend Alex Feldman and I grossly underestimated the required travel and ended up not sleeping very much. But it was awesome. I loved the city. So much in fact that the two of us ended up enrolling in a basic German class once we got back to Philadelphia. I, of course, remember almost nothing from this class, but I can say apfelstrudel with a surprising degree of convincingness, provided there are no follow-up questions.
One of the ingredients that, I think, made Berlin what it is today is that, at one point, it had a lot of empty buildings. As many of you know, these under-utilized assets ended up becoming a breeding ground for creativity and, more specifically, techno music. It's a perfect example of Jane Jacobs' mantra that new ideas required old buildings. This overall creative energy is also what gave Berlin the slogan, "poor but sexy." What the city lacked in wealth, it made up for in spades with coolness and creativity.
But that was then. Eventually the buildings filled up, the city got richer, the secret got out, and things started getting more expensive. In the span of a decade, Berlin saw its average apartment rents double. Which is why in 2020, the city approved a five-year rent freeze for the 1.5 million or so flats that were constructed before 2014. Eventually this freeze was deemed unconstitutional, but it didn't change the fact that the city was clearly becoming less poor and -- arguably -- less sexy.
Or maybe not. Guy Chazan -- who is FT's departing correspondent in Berlin, just wrote this in a
I recently came across this for-sale listing from Fantastic Frank for a 3-room apartment in Berlin's new Am Tacheles district. Naturally, I thought to myself, "Hey, this is a beautiful apartment — now let me go all the way back to the beginning of the 20th century and better understand the history of the development site."
Am Tacheles has been called the most controversial real estate project in Berlin's modern history. Previously developed in 1908 as a high-end shopping arcade intended to rival the great galleries of Paris, the Friedrichstraßenpassage, as it was known, was an ambitious undertaking located in the city's historic Jewish quarter.
But only about six months after opening, the project went bankrupt. The existing building then went on to live numerous lives, ranging from an AEG showroom to a building used to house French war prisoners, before ultimately being co-opted by artists in 1990 as a way to save it from demolition.
It was at this point that it was given the name Tacheles, which is a Yiddish word meaning "to speak straight." Supposedly, this was a reference to the area's history as a thriving Jewish quarter and a message about political honesty (it is located in the former East Berlin, where that wasn't a thing).
For the next two decades, the site became a global symbol of Berlin's "poor but sexy" identity. The ownership vacuum created by the fall of the Berlin Wall meant that nobody really knew who owned what. This was a disaster for clear property rights and capital investment, but fortuitous for squatters who needed cheap (okay, free) space to experiment with art and techno music.
In my view, this was ultimately a net positive for the city. It created an urban vitality that nobody could have predicted, demonstrating the potential of people and cities when allowed to experiment and take risks.
But then, basically, two things happened: (1) people eventually figured out who owned what, and (2) the development potential of the site became increasingly valuable. This is the quintessential urban cycle. First, the artists and creatives come in to take advantage of cheap space. They then make the area cool. And then developers like me come in to monetize it, completing the cycle.
Fast forward to today, and Am Tacheles (they kept the name) is a new master-planned community designed by Swiss architects Herzog & de Meuron and one of the most desirable (and thus expensive) areas in Berlin. It's also quite a bit tidier there these days, though they did preserve some of the graffiti.
Returning to our 3-room apartment listing, the asking price is €1,825,000 + €90,000 (for what I believe is a parking space). At 113 sqm, this works out to ~€16,947 per sqm or about C$2,529 per sqft (for comparison to Toronto prices). As I understand it, this is well above the average new construction home prices in the area and city.
What is clear is that Berlin is no longer poor. It's global-city rich. But is it still sexy?
Cover photo and floor from Fantastic Frank
Historic Tacheles photo via Wikipedia
Am Tacheless photo and stairwell section from H&dM
I've only been to Berlin once. It was for a long weekend in 2007; one where my friend Alex Feldman and I grossly underestimated the required travel and ended up not sleeping very much. But it was awesome. I loved the city. So much in fact that the two of us ended up enrolling in a basic German class once we got back to Philadelphia. I, of course, remember almost nothing from this class, but I can say apfelstrudel with a surprising degree of convincingness, provided there are no follow-up questions.
One of the ingredients that, I think, made Berlin what it is today is that, at one point, it had a lot of empty buildings. As many of you know, these under-utilized assets ended up becoming a breeding ground for creativity and, more specifically, techno music. It's a perfect example of Jane Jacobs' mantra that new ideas required old buildings. This overall creative energy is also what gave Berlin the slogan, "poor but sexy." What the city lacked in wealth, it made up for in spades with coolness and creativity.
But that was then. Eventually the buildings filled up, the city got richer, the secret got out, and things started getting more expensive. In the span of a decade, Berlin saw its average apartment rents double. Which is why in 2020, the city approved a five-year rent freeze for the 1.5 million or so flats that were constructed before 2014. Eventually this freeze was deemed unconstitutional, but it didn't change the fact that the city was clearly becoming less poor and -- arguably -- less sexy.
Or maybe not. Guy Chazan -- who is FT's departing correspondent in Berlin, just wrote this in a
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
Despite everything it is still, in the words of one Irish friend of mine who has lived here for more than two decades, the world’s “largest collection of black sheep”. It is a sanctuary for renegades and misfits of all persuasions, who benignly coexist with their more bourgeois Bürger neighbours. Despite the rising cost of living here, it still seems to be full of creative people doing God knows what but always looking like they’re having the time of their lives.
And as anyone navigating its countless construction sites knows, it’s also a place of sheer, unbounded potentiality. As the art critic Karl Scheffler famously wrote in 1910: it is a city that is “damned to keep becoming, and never to be”. When I finally board the plane out of here after nearly a decade in this city, it will be that “becoming-ness” I’ll miss most.
This to me is an incredible compliment for a city that I barely know, but that he presumably knows quite well. What makes cities truly great is that they're constantly in a state of becoming. In fact, it's exactly how I would describe Toronto. To be, means you've arrived somewhere. It also implies a certain stasis. And that's not what you want when you're a city. You want a constant flow of news ideas and new energy changing things. It makes me happy to know that Berlin, seemingly, hasn't lost this.
Cover photo by Stephan Widua on Unsplash
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
Despite everything it is still, in the words of one Irish friend of mine who has lived here for more than two decades, the world’s “largest collection of black sheep”. It is a sanctuary for renegades and misfits of all persuasions, who benignly coexist with their more bourgeois Bürger neighbours. Despite the rising cost of living here, it still seems to be full of creative people doing God knows what but always looking like they’re having the time of their lives.
And as anyone navigating its countless construction sites knows, it’s also a place of sheer, unbounded potentiality. As the art critic Karl Scheffler famously wrote in 1910: it is a city that is “damned to keep becoming, and never to be”. When I finally board the plane out of here after nearly a decade in this city, it will be that “becoming-ness” I’ll miss most.
This to me is an incredible compliment for a city that I barely know, but that he presumably knows quite well. What makes cities truly great is that they're constantly in a state of becoming. In fact, it's exactly how I would describe Toronto. To be, means you've arrived somewhere. It also implies a certain stasis. And that's not what you want when you're a city. You want a constant flow of news ideas and new energy changing things. It makes me happy to know that Berlin, seemingly, hasn't lost this.
Cover photo by Stephan Widua on Unsplash
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