Slender/Bender, Berlin
[Note: the Miniloft Miniloft building is called 'Slender/Bender']
Slender/Bender is an attempt to reconcile conservative urban planning with contemporary architecture. Bender is the renovation of an existing building, while Slender is a residential and office building addition. The proud six-storey structure with its gently curved exterior is wrapped in stainless steel bands, dividing it into a three-part architectural sculpture. Its broad façade, attached to the building like an outsized bay window, opens up with what for Berlin are unusually large windows. Everything about the building is drawn out lengthways: rooms and open spaces are lined up like a long chain, visitors are kept constantly in motion, exploring the depths of the house, climbing the stretched stairway to the upper floors, the miniature roof garden, a suspended platform in the two-storey bedroom, a protruding balcony. If Slender/Bender is about flowing spaces and dynamic outlines, then the building also seems to reflect deadline's creative ethos that owes to the AA in London.
From Slender/Bender, Berlin in MIMOA – mi modern architecture, text: Christian Welzbacher
