Apartment building Krausnickstrasse

What we found here, on the plot of land at Krausnickstraße 15 in Berlin's Spandauer Vorstadt, was a building whose street-side façade was roughly plastered and without adornment. The plaster had fallen off in spots so that the horizontal and vertical joints carved into the plastered masonry wall had become visible in the wall structure. The entry portal arch and cornice had also been roughly plastered over, only the pediment of the house with its cornice and the exterior entrance hinted at more delicate divisions. The main cornice was missing. Since the façade had no other divisions in the plastering, we first intended to use a smooth plaster, albeit of pure lime.

We wanted to avoid painting at all costs. The color of the façade was to be achieved exclusively by ingredients added to the lime plaster. We had a reddish shade in mind. Adding brick powder produced a shrill, bright red color and only the addition of salmon-colored marble powder achieved the pale eggplant-like shade we wanted. Removing the entire plaster façade revealed that the building's exterior had been revamped at least three times.

To accommodate protruding boss stone elements in the façade on the upper floors, horizontal and vertical joints were carved into the entire surface. The edges of the window casements had been beveled off. This was evidently done later, probably in the 1880's. The dimensions for the individual boss elements were found in a bay window on the first upper floor, which must have been installed in some subsequent renovation work.

More delicate divisions of the plaster, as well as painted joints, ranging from round arches to horizontal joints, became visible in the area of the elevated ground floor. However, these arches are flatter than the arches of the window openings, which leads to the assumption that the upper window sashes were increased in height in another reconstruction phase. There is still a round arch in the masonry over the entrance doors since the entry was rebuilt with a flatter arch.

At the same time, the entrances to the basement were combined with the windows of the raised ground floor by means of a projection, roof, and massive cornice. Removal of the cornice of the building's pediment revealed the original cornice, which was continuous to the opening of the main entrance door and had no offset whatsoever.

Not only for technical construction reasons did we abandon our plan to cover the front of the building with smooth plaster. The plaster already there had cracks in the joint areas, the beveling of the soffits would have had to be filled in, or we would have had to resort to all sorts of stopgap constructs, which is not our style.

The elevated ground floor was given a smooth plaster; the fine joints in the building's pediment have been restored. The original version of the pediment cornice has been worked out, although it continues only to the door casement which was installed later and which we wanted to maintain.

For tectonic and urban planning reasons, the building got a pediment combining the basement and the elevated ground floor with a height that provides a base for the protruding stone façade. The newly designed massive main cornice provides a conclusion to the façade and a prominent portion of the street profile and connects the structure in a line of perspective set by the other buildings on the street.