Berlin Atlas 5

The exhibition features collages by invited architects, artists, and other planners, presenting proposals for the continued development and renovation of the city. Following the linear infrastructure trilogy (transformation of the A103, reactivation of the industrial railway, city along the Teltow Canal), this exhibition focuses on selective design strategies—on “ISLANDS,” so to speak, or rather on places that can be conceived as such: niches, lenses, cores, settlement chambers, and urban archipelagos.

The curators are convinced that the question of how Berlin should continue to develop should not be limited to the S-Bahn ring and the areas within it, nor to the building typologies that prevail there. Rather, they encourage an exploration of the blank spots on the map of urban development: single-family home neighborhoods, industrial brownfields, obsolete plans, traces of historical settlements and infrastructure, and topographies—both organic and man-made. We are interested in these places from a qualitative perspective. Can they serve as the starting point for a design practice that counteracts boundless, monotonous urban sprawl—and thereby creates new parts of the city that provide space for the needs of a diverse society? Maxime is meant to be an architecture that works with what is there while simultaneously critiquing it. An architecture that transforms, overcomes, integrates, reshapes, supplements, amputates, juxtaposes, alienates, misinterprets, exaggerates, coarsens or refines, condenses, and liberates. An architecture that offers affirmative criticism—by revealing possibilities. The architectural collage is both a classic representational technique and a tool that can stimulate, explore, and convey an engagement with the existing.

Opening: October 13, 2026, 7:00 p.m.