Mia Alian

Tracing Berlin | Berlin, Germany | Unit 21 | 2025 Amid the trees of Berlin’s Hansaviertel, where silence once followed devastation, this project listens. Through the lens of digital drawing, a new architectural language emerges; one that does not simply build, but remembers. An elderly community centre rises, not as monument, but as medium. Here, history is embedded in the floor, held in the acoustics of laughter, the hush of

Yasmeen Timothy Yusuf-Burrell

Reclaiming Hostile Ground | Berlin, Germany | Unit 21 | 2025 An investigation into how a historic site stained by fascism can both condemn that legacy and embrace another, raising the building above ground and treating it as hostile whilst simultaneously inviting the public to occupy the space and engage in performance. The design is for a music venue in Mitte, in the heart of Berlin, inspired by Pink Floyd’s

Xinyu (Eva) Zhang

Letters with Signature: The Letter Museum | Berlin, Germany | Unit 21 | 2025 The Nordbahnhof Park, once bisected by the Berlin Wall, remained as no man’s land for decades: a silent witness to division. This project builds on the reactive system to transform the site into a living archive. Sound and motion sensors capture conversations that were never allowed to happen, embedding past memories into the ground. An abandoned

Ngoc (Chau Anh) Tran

All the Light We Cannot See | Berlin, Germany | Unit 21 | 2025 Germany has a long history with disability, particularly among war veterans post World War II. This project draws from that legacy and the unit’s theme of multimodality, addressing senses beyond sight, which architecture often privileges. Sited at Charité University Hospital in Berlin, the building is an educational and recreational Center for the blind. It responds to

Hanxiang (Christopher) Tao

Drawing Machines: Charcoal and Bunkers | Berlin, Germany | Unit 21 | 2025 The Charcoal Drawing Machine combines three methods of recording a single subject in one continuous operation: a digital 3D scan, a physical charcoal smudge, and an analogue light-rail drawing. As the scanner captures geometry, a smudging arm applies charcoal to paper, while a light-rail apparatus simultaneously traces the form with precise lines. The Bunker Drawing Machine repurposes

Charles Warren (Charlie) Stone

Post Surveillance Narcissus | Berlin, Germany | Unit 21 | 2025 | Year 3 Inspired by the hundreds of thousands of ruined archives leftover by the Stasi after their fall in 1990, Post Surveillance Narcissus anticipates a Berlin where machine vision exists in a post-surveillance state, and its use is not one of subversive data collection and spying but rather used as a tool for responsive spatial arrangement. The building, an archival

Anoushka Sarma

Unclassical Music | Berlin, Germany | Unit 21 | 2025 Unclassical Music redefines the rehearsal and performance of classical music, serving as a complex of rehearsal rooms for the Berlin Philharmonie, an instrument repair shop, and a café. Above the rehearsal spaces sit a series of ‘sensory chambers’ that filter noise from below and distort the auditory experience. It explores sensory representation, culminating in distorted spaces shaped by the phenomenology

Dhruva Vijaya Kumar Menon

The Spreepark Journal | Berlin, Germany | Unit 21 | 2025 A multiscalar intervention embedded in Berlin’s Spreepark, a former amusement park now under redevelopment. The project reclaims the site’s layered history and industrial residue, transforming it into a public space for retreat and material experimentation. It combines a bathhouse, ceramics workshop, and ecological research centre, where leisure, production, and environmental storytelling intersect. At the project’s core is an ambition

Luke Shun Grbesa

ZØNE-137 | Berlin, Germany | Unit 21 | 2025 ZØNE-137 is a Situationist Techno Park that proposes an assembly of listening and archival spaces that both celebrate and perform techno on a post-industrial site adjacent to Köpi 137 in South-East Berlin. Drawing from Situationist theory and techno subculture, the project blurs boundaries between structure, performance, and activation. Architecture becomes not a fixed composition but a programmable field of possibilities: spaces

Xingjian (Caesar) Liu

New Signal on an Old Hill: Weaving Music into Spatial Experience | Berlin, Germany | Unit 21 | 2025 Teufelsberg, once a Cold War listening post in Berlin, is a hill layered with forgotten signal—encrypted messages, lost transmissions, and the static of surveillance. This project weaves music into architecture, composing a new spatial signal across the hill. Using live instruments, motion capture, and audio analysis, music becomes the generative force.

Oscar John Brice

Choreographing the Civic Performance | Berlin, Germany | Unit 21 | 2025 Crafted from the sightlines of Berlin’s Super Audience and routed in the political nature of performative roles, the New Citizens’ Forum reimagines the relationship between public discourse, civic performance and audience spectatorship. This building project is manifested in the dramaturgical concept of the ‘super audience’ and transforms civic engagement and political debate into an immersive, theatrical act where

Yuan Cheng (Graeme) Wong

Augmented Grounds | Berlin, Germany | Unit 21 | 2025 Augmented Grounds reimagines Berlin’s Mauerpark as a doped landscape, one that performs year-round through environmental enhancement. Designed through a feedback loop with a responsive drawing machine, the project evolves seasonally, where terrain becomes infrastructure and climate becomes a tool for performance. It houses both a civic park and the new National Anti Doping Agency of Germany (NADA) Centre for Clean

Hiroha Aoki

Double Vision | Berlin, Germany | Unit 21 | 2025 This project began as an experiment using AI to explore how the machine recognizes the form of a horse, gradually developing into an investigation of how AI perceives windows and architectural openings. In an age where AI increasingly drives society toward a state of surveillance, this project, situated on the boundary where the Berlin Wall once stood, explores the construction

Polina Parshyna

The Cycle: Berlin | Berlin, Germany | Unit 21 | 2025 The Cycle is a conceptual laundrette that offers a light-filled, communal space for washing clothes and strengthening local ties. It is located in what was once the ‘death strip’, the space between the inner and outer walls of the Berlin Wall. The site’s complex history was central to the design approach, with the building’s form and layout derived from