Urban Oasis: Turning a Former Spandau Barracks into a Dense District That Grows Its Own Green

Most densification plans treat green space as the thing that gets traded away. Urban Oasis starts from the opposite premise: the garden is not what the city loses when it grows, it is what the city should be built around. The proposal takes Berlin's deep-rooted culture of urban gardening and promotes it from a peripheral pastime to a core architectural and urban strategy, so that greenhouses, garden communities and productive landscapes become part of the built fabric rather than leftovers between buildings.

Designed by Evgenii Varlygin and Anastasiya Soshnikova, Urban Oasis addresses the renovation of a former barracks territory in Berlin's Spandau district. The site carries layers of history, from military infrastructure to informal garden communities, and much of it is expected to face densification as urban pressure rises. The designers do not resist that pressure. They reframe it, presenting the project as a response to the problems shared by megacities: land scarcity, ecological imbalance, social fragmentation and the steady loss of productive green space.

Cabbage Beds Beside Brick: Cultivation as Part of the Block

The opening collage sets the tone. In one frame, gardeners work cabbage beds next to a curved golden canopy. In the other, a white block lifted on slender columns sits beside red brick housing. Neither image keeps agriculture at a polite distance from architecture. That reflects the project's analytical groundwork: historical maps from the early 20th century to the present trace how built mass and green areas have shifted across the site, and that research supports a strategy where density and cultivation coexist instead of competing.

The raised block deserves particular attention. Lifting a volume off the ground is an old modernist move, but here it serves a practical argument. It frees the ground plane for planting and movement while the program stacks above. This is one of a family of typologies the designers develop, ranging from compact housing blocks with rooftop greenhouses to linear structures that combine residential, communal and productive functions. Each one responds to its own site conditions, regulations and spatial limits.

Bridges Overhead, a Permeable Ground Plane Below

A steel truss bridge crosses a plaza between a yellow volume and a red brick building while pedestrians gather underneath. This is the project's connective logic in a single frame. Elevated walkways and bridges link buildings at height, which keeps the ground level open so landscape can run through the site without interruption. The truss reads as infrastructure rather than ornament, and that matters: the bridges do practical work, threading the quarters together without walling off the plazas they span.

That connective tissue is needed because the territory is not a single masterplan gesture. It is divided into groups of quarters, each interpreting urban gardening in its own way. Some favor community gardens and shared courtyards, while others lift greenhouses into elevated structures or tuck them into inner blocks. The bridges and green corridors are what turn this variety into a district rather than a collection of experiments.

Arches That Frame the Square and Carry the Park

The arch becomes a recurring motif. One view looks through a large concrete arch onto a paved, tree-lined square at night, with a crowd gathered and a crescent moon overhead. Another shows a grassy park with a winding path under a tall arched viaduct, and a third shows a golden arcade busy with cyclists and walkers. In each case the arch does two things at once: it frames a public room and it lets movement pass through it. This is the permeability the project promises made visible, with landscape continuing beneath structure instead of ending at it.

The night scene is the most telling. A square full of people after dark suggests the designers see these spaces as more than daytime amenities for gardeners. They describe the public realm as a social condenser where residents, visitors and growers cross paths, and the arcades and viaduct give that ambition a strong architectural frame that can be read at the scale of the district.

Golden Market Stalls Along an Arcaded Street

The final rendering brings the idea down to street level. Golden arched market stalls line one side, a tall arcaded wall runs along the other, and a red church spire rises in the distance. The stalls echo the golden canopy from the opening collage, a material thread connecting cultivation to exchange. The project names markets, workshops and shared cultivation areas as the programs that turn everyday activity into community engagement, and this street is where that chain closes: what grows in the quarters has a place to be sold and shared.

The distant spire is a small but useful detail. It anchors the proposal in an existing Berlin skyline and reminds the viewer that this is a renovation of a place with history, not a new town on empty land.

Why This Project Matters

Urban Oasis rejects the assumption that a city must choose between housing more people and keeping its productive green space. By embedding greenhouses, community gardens and planted corridors into housing, public buildings and circulation networks, it treats nature and architecture as one system. The range of typologies, from rooftop greenhouses to elevated blocks and linear mixed-use structures, makes the argument concrete instead of rhetorical.

Its strongest claim is transferability. Spandau provides the site, but the method of reading historical layers, dividing the territory into quarters with their own gardening logic, and stitching them together with bridges and a permeable ground plane could apply to any growing city facing land scarcity. Varlygin and Soshnikova propose a future in which cities grow without erasing green space, and their drawings make a persuasive case that density and cultivation can share the same ground.

View the Full Project

About the Designers

Designers: Evgenii Varlygin, Anastasiya Soshnikova

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Project credits: URBAN OASIS - Renovation of territory of former barracks, Spandau district, Berlin by Evgenii Varlygin, Anastasiya Soshnikova.