Dockyard – Berlin

The Dockyard sits on the banks of the Spree at Berlin’s Osthafen: a seven-storey timber-hybrid complex by TCHOBAN VOSS with one of Europe’s largest ice-storage energy systems, making it one of the most sustainable office buildings in Germany. Within it, Ippolito Fleitz Group designed the identity spaces for developer Pecan Development: two lobbies, a marketing suite and the wayfinding that ties the 32,000 m² ensemble together.

The lobbies translate the harbour’s history into furniture. Seating stacks like freight sacks, pendant lights hang like crane loads, and the reception desk is cinched with a bright strap like a shipping crate; every element is modular and reversible. Two artworks anchor the double-height voids: Julius von Bismarck’s bent-wire wave, multiplied endlessly by a mirrored ceiling, and Kwangho Lee’s woven nylon ropes behind the desks. Wood meets sandblasted shell limestone, exposed concrete meets carpet, and vertical filters temper the acoustics.

On the fifth floor, the 250 m² marketing suite works like a loft: an open plan divided at will by curtains, with a DJ desk stocked with vinyl from the surrounding clubs, a swing embroidered Happy Together, and beer mats pointing to the neighbourhood’s bars. The playful clues carry the sustainability story too, down to the fridge that asks Ice, Ice, Baby in honour of the energy system below.

The wayfinding runs the idea to the last door: bent-steel numerals on concrete, painted outlines in the stairwells, and garage pylons that give even the parking levels the graphic confidence of the lobbies.