The six-story residential and commercial MIN MAX building is conceived as a city block that attains the maximum permissible height so as to continue the cornice line along Boulevard Lilienthal. In plan, the building fills virtually the entire buildable area, making it key to defining the space of the adjacent streets and green areas. The building has commercial spaces on the ground floor and small apartments for a heterogeneous group of residents, thus providing an alternative to the offerings previously available in the new district of Glattpark.
The project offers four types of small apartments, each with around 40 m² of living space, as well as cluster apartments that enable communal living with individual rooms for every resident. Alongside the important aspect of spanning the range between community and anonymity, particular interest is given here to the question of how compact dwelling units can yield new attributes that transcend a mere reduction in the size of a conventional apartment.
The building surrounds an inner courtyard that is the central and salient place for the community. Access galleries allow it to also serve as a circulation space, and a tower-like glazed element contributes supplemental space for shared use on each floor.

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The Speich property has a special urban position at the juncture between a district of perimeter blocks and heterogeneous development at Wipkingerplatz, the Hardbrücke bridge and the riverside space, which, in urbanistic terms, called for a Janus-like building. The building responds with an expressive and independent guise, particularly through the formation of a head building on Wipkingerplatz, which reoccupies the place. On the street side, sculptural interlocking counteracts the classical tripartite division of base, midsection and top and enhances the expressiveness of the building form. On the river side, terracing of the garden, configuration of the courtyard elements as a building plinth, and planted balconies and roof terraces establish a thoroughly different character, reminiscent of vertical or hanging gardens. The facade’s ceramic cladding – inspired by the ocher-colored bricks typical of the area – contrasts with and dematerializes the bulk and weight of the built form, depending on how the light reflects off it.
Consistent with the flexibility of use required by the program, the building has been systematically liberated from binding ties to the structure. This includes the skeletal frame of reinforced concrete, the lightweight interior partitions, and suspended ceilings in some places that conceal building services installations that are otherwise exposed. Disposed this way, the living quarters explore the spatial potential of the “plan libre.”

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