GRAFT Carves Berlin's Former Ice Factory into a Mixed-Use Campus Inspired by Shifting Ice Floes

Berlin's industrial waterfront has always been a contested landscape, caught between heritage preservation and the pressures of densification. The Eiswerk, completed by GRAFT in 2022, sits at the intersection of both forces: an 18,200 square meter redevelopment of a former artificial ice production plant wedged between the Spree River and Köpenicker Straße in Berlin-Mitte. The Norddeutsche Eiswerke AG built the original complex from 1909 onward, producing ice commercially until 1995. What GRAFT has done here is not a simple adaptive reuse. It is a three-part composition, threading a residential building, a converted cold store, and a new office building around a shared forecourt that, for the first time, punches a public route from the street to the riverbank.

The most provocative gesture is the new office building, Haus A, whose massing reads as four horizontal volumes offset from one another like ice blocks calving from a shelf. The metaphor is literal (this was an ice factory) but the execution is sharp enough to transcend the concept sketch. Each offset creates terraces and overhangs, pulling the building's proportions from the listed heritage structure opposite. The result is an ensemble that feels both referential and confrontational, a campus that respects its industrial ghosts while carving out entirely new ground-level urban life.

Ice Blocks on the Street

From Köpenicker Straße, the new office building announces itself with a stacked composition of cantilevered volumes. The horizontal slicing is unambiguous. Each floor plate shifts laterally, creating deep reveals at the soffits and protruding bays that cast strong shadow lines across the facade. GRAFT pulls the heights of these volumes directly from the proportional rhythms of the listed ice works building across the way, grounding the contemporary gesture in a measured response to context rather than pure formal impulse.

At street level, the ground floor retreats behind retail frontage, and the overhang above creates a generous covered zone for pedestrians and cyclists. The golden-paneled residential facade visible through the adjacent gap provides a tonal counterpoint: warm metal cladding with rhythmic balcony projections that read as a quieter, more domestic register beside the office block's assertive geometry.

The Courtyard as Urban Threshold

The central forecourt is the connective tissue of the entire scheme. Flanked by residential wings and anchored by the glazed office facade, it functions as a semi-public room: part plaza, part garden, part lobby. Brick pavers recall the industrial palette, while planted beds with ornamental grasses and young trees soften the enclosure. The design by landscape architect Stephan Haan treats the courtyard not as leftover space between buildings but as the primary site of encounter, linking lobbies, conference areas, restaurants, and cultural facilities at grade.

What makes the courtyard work is its legibility as a through-route. Berlin-Mitte's masterplan for the Nördliche Luisenstadt envisioned a continuous river promenade, and GRAFT's site plan delivers on that ambition by cracking the block open. You enter from Köpenicker Straße and arrive at the Spree. That is a simple idea, but executing it required negotiating the geometries of three distinct building footprints, underground parking access, and heritage setbacks. The result feels effortless, which is usually the sign that it wasn't.

Old Brick, New Glass

The tension between the listed red brick fabric and the new aluminium-and-glass interventions is most palpable in the narrow passage connecting the courtyard to the street. Here, a heritage wall of exposed red brick runs parallel to a curtain wall of floor-to-ceiling glazing with vertical louvres, compressing the old and new into a single frame. GRAFT does not try to blur the boundary. The material contrast is intentional: heavy masonry against transparent skin, the weight of industrial memory against the lightness of contemporary workspace.

On the courtyard side, the office building's facade steps out in cantilevered tiers, its vertical white fins providing solar control and visual rhythm. The glazing is generous enough to dissolve the boundary between interior workspace and exterior landscape, a quality that co-working tenants will appreciate. The terraces formed by each offset volume offer outdoor space at every level, turning the ice-block massing concept into usable amenity.

Terrace Logic

Looking up at the cantilevered corner, the structural ambition becomes clear. Deep recessed soffits, protruding window bays, and the rhythmic cadence of vertical fins give the building a geological quality, as if layers of sediment had been pushed and faulted by tectonic force. The metaphor of shifting ice is most convincing at these oblique angles, where the horizontal displacement of each volume registers as genuine movement rather than ornamental effect.

The terraces are not decorative. Each offset creates an outdoor floor tied to the interior office layout, meaning that tenants on upper levels have direct access to open air without relying on rooftop amenity alone. In a dense urban block near Ostbahnhof, where outdoor space is scarce, this kind of distributed terrace strategy adds real value to the commercial floors.

Residential Wings and the Roofscape

The residential component fronting Köpenicker Straße adopts a calmer register: a gridded facade of ribbon windows, balconies, and a measured rhythm of vertical mullions. It reads as a Berlin apartment building should, providing street enclosure and domestic scale without competing with the office block's expressive massing. The aerial views reveal the terracotta-toned courtyard roofscape in both summer greenery and winter snow, confirming that the ensemble reads as a coherent campus from above, not a collision of unrelated buildings.

The seasonal contrast in the drone images is telling. In summer, the courtyard planting, the rooftop patinas, and the Spree's proximity create an almost village-like sense of enclosure. In winter, the geometric clarity of the plan is laid bare, the angular footprints and their triangulated relationships fully legible against the snow. It is a scheme that rewards both the pedestrian and the bird's eye.

Plans and Drawings

The ground floor plans reveal how the three building volumes are arranged around the central courtyard at deliberate angles, breaking from the orthogonal street grid to maximize sightlines toward the Spree and to widen the pedestrian route at its narrowest points. The triangular atrium of the office building organizes open workstations and meeting rooms along its angled perimeter wings, a geometry that avoids the dead corners typical of rectangular floor plates. The residential plans show an L-shaped configuration with a central circulation core, efficient but not reductive, giving every unit a courtyard or street orientation.

The sections are equally instructive. The varying heights of the residential towers step down toward the office block, which mediates between the taller street frontage and the lower heritage structures near the river. A sloped roof on one volume echoes the industrial pitched forms of the original cold store. Underground parking is tucked beneath the courtyard, keeping the ground plane free for the public passage that defines the entire project.

Why This Project Matters

Berlin is full of industrial conversions that preserve facades and gut interiors, producing buildings that are simultaneously nostalgic and generic. Eiswerk avoids that trap by treating the heritage fabric as one instrument in a larger composition rather than the composition itself. The former cold store is converted, yes, but the real architectural proposition is Haus A and the public forecourt, both of which are entirely new and unafraid to assert themselves against the listed structures. The ice-block massing could easily have been a one-liner. Instead, it generates terraces, solar shading, proportional dialogue, and spatial variety at every floor.

More importantly, the project delivers on a promise that many Berlin waterfront developments make but few keep: genuine public access to the Spree. By cracking the block open and aligning the courtyard with the planned river promenade, GRAFT transforms a private industrial enclave into a piece of urban infrastructure. That shift, from closed production site to open civic passage, is the real conversion here, and it is the one that will outlast any metaphor about ice.

Eiswerk by GRAFT, Berlin, Germany. 18,200 m², completed 2022. Photographs by Ana Sampaio Barros and Noam Rosenthal / Trockland.

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