People drink their morning cappuccino in the cafés, practise sun salutations in the yoga studio and carefully carry a pane of glass from the glassworks. Oderberger Strasse in Berlin's Prenzlauer Berg district is a place where living, working and leisure are close together. With its gray-brown façade, the narrow building right next to the Stadtbad, which has been converted into a hotel, looks quite inconspicuous at first glance. At second glance, however, the tiny exhibition space with its shop window facing the street and the large studio windows on the second floor arouse curiosity. From the stairwell with its bright yellow banister, you can catch a glimpse of one of the apartments: Walls made of exposed concrete, a high room with a gallery, a wall full of books.

All the apartments have several levels, almost all of them consist of a larger and a smaller part, both of which are accessible from the stairwell. This not only creates a special feeling of living, it also means that the smaller part can easily be separated off and converted into a separate apartment, for example when adult children move out. On the second floor, commercial space offers room to work, while on the first floor, stores and restaurants open up the building to the street. Oderberger Strasse 56 is essentially a kind of case study that explores how a building can meet complex urban needs.

The second floor houses the office of BAR-Architekten, who built the building in 2010. Michael von Matuschka founded the "Base for Architecture and Research" in 1992 together with fellow students Antje Buchholz, Jack Burnett-Stuart and Jürgen Patzak-Poor. This is definitely not a show-off office. The room is just under 40 square meters in size, with plain white wooden panels serving as desks. On a shelf in front of the large window facing the street are wooden building models like a miniature city.

Michael Matuschka dispenses with the black turtleneck sweater and black horn-rimmed glasses that make some of his colleagues look like replicas of themselves. His glasses are light-colored and he wears a red hoodie with dark blue work trousers. To explain how the BAR team works, he grabs a kind of plywood case from the shelf. If you open it up, you can see a miniature version of an apartment from above. "We all moved into these unrenovated apartments shortly after reunification. Most of them didn't have a bathroom. When the housing associations started installing bathrooms, we found that they were actually making the floor plans of the apartments worse," explains Matuschka. That's why they developed the idea of the walk-through bathroom. In the model, Matuschka shows how a hallway can be transformed into a bathroom by closing two doors. The result is a room that can be used in different ways depending on requirements. This first project already makes the BAR program clear: it is about researching the complex needs of people in urban spaces and developing solutions that meet them. Matuschka speaks calmly and with concentration, a man who means business. Only occasionally does a small grin flit across his face beneath his thick, gray mop of hair, making him appear boyish. He doesn't make any grand gestures, his hands are busy pointing out details in the model.

Models have been an essential part of the architectural team's work since they studied under William Firebrace at the Berlin University of the Arts (now Berlin University of the Arts). Firebrace taught the students to develop spatial concepts from the observation of existing contexts. Building prototypes played a major role in this. "Above all, models serve communication, the joint development of solutions, comprehension in the truest sense of the word," says Matuschka.