A new apartment complex in Hamburg, Germany, intends to generate heat, as well as revenue, from growing the micro-organism. The five-story Bio Intelligent Quotient (B.I.Q.) building, which was expected to become fully operational on Wednesday, has a high-tech facade that looks like a cross between a Mondrian painting and a terrarium but is actually a vertical algae farm. — nytimes.com

Big Air Package is the latest project from artist Christo installed at the Gasometer Oberhausen in Germany, a facility that still holds the record as the largest disc-type gas holder in Europe that was converted into an exhibition hall in the 1990s. Big Air Package is the largest ever inflated envelope without aid of a skeleton (Gasometer Oberhausen bills it as the largest indoor sculpture in history) and reaches 90 meters high, with a diameter of 50 meters and a volume of 177,000 cubic meters. — thisiscolossal.com

Richard Meier & Partners’ mixed-use building was selected in an international competition topping submissions by Foster + Partners and Zaha Hadid Architects. The challenge, Bernhard Karpf, associate partner-in-charge, said was to create a hybrid building that was “like a city in itself,” which creates “property lines” that carves out distinct areas for rentals, offices, and shops, but still comes together in a unified and coherent design. — The Architect's Newspaper

In true Studio Berlin fashion, this last summer's group has put together a short film on their escapades throughout Europe. Enjoy! — archinect.com

Modern retailers go to extremes to make their mark and compete within an increasingly competitive market. This often goes beyond out the box design ideals such as virtual retail or smartphone-based shopping processes. — DesignBuild Source

A recent structural discovery that was recently found buried beneath 30 tonnes of rubble has the global industry abuzz.

The architectural secret, which was dubbed ‘Berlin’s best kept architectural secret,’ is a three-storey German Music Hall Theatre, designed by famous architect and business owner Oscar Garbe and built in 1905. — DesignBuild Source

"I was very fortunate because the first building in Germany was the Museum for Applied Art, which was a competition that I won. After that I was invited to do other competitions. There's an appreciation for architecture in Germany that doesn't exist in many other places." — Deutsche Welle

When asked, the German-born “Father of Fonts” insists that there is nothing similar about designing a typeface and designing a house. “They’re totally different,” he says, in excellent English peppered with correctly implemented expletives. “With a typeface, you design a space. A letter is defined by the inside space, more than it is by the outside. You design for shape, but also for function.”... “In either case,” he concedes, “the design is as much about function as it is about aesthetics.” — dwell.com

The general Idea from my interpretation was to produce a lightweight structure that uses minimal material yet uses technology to account for the lack of girth and material. - Rogelio Mercado — Rogelio Mercado

Threats by left-wing activists in Berlin prompted New York’s Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation to cancel a planned stop in the city’s Kreuzberg district for its mobile laboratory, the BMW Guggenheim Lab. — bloomberg

The city was initially prepared to contribute €77 million to the project – but this figure has since gone up by nearly five times to more than €323 million – more than half the expected €600 million total cost. And the original completion date of 2010 has been pushed back to 2014.

The building’s designers had underestimated certain costs – such as an acoustic panelling for the main concert hall which cost five times as much as expected, adding more than €10 million to the bill. — thelocal.de

Prora was designed to accommodate 20,000 people in one go. Hitler was convinced Germany lost World War I because its population lost its nerve. His idea was to create cheap package holidays to wed the nation to Nazism and to shape happy, strong, well-rested new generations capable of winning the next war. — Der Spiegel

Raumlabor just completed construction on "The Big Crunch" - a recycled building made from a heap of discarded objects. The mound of materials is condensed in a theater plaza from all over the area, seemingly to move like a small wave cresting on the Georg-Büchner-Platz grounds in Darmstadt, Germany. — Inhabitat

With its strips of glass windows and clean geometric structures, the building paved the way for a modernist style which became the trademark of the Bauhaus. The factory still produces shoe lasts, the forms used to mould shoes, to this day. — Der Spiegel