Kleine Rittergasse 11

Franken Architekten was commissioned to renovate an existing building into a home and studio in the heart of Alt-Sachsenhausen. But as preserving the run-down, three-story building turned out to be prohibitive from the perspectives of economics, construction, and even architectural history, the architect and client decided to demolish it. As the new building’s scale and façade had to integrate themselves successfully, the architects duplicated the form of the existing while simplifying it. For the façade the notion of the afterimage was employed – the effect of staring at an object for a length of time and seeing a blurry or faded rendition of it after closing one’s eyes. So a picture of the demolished building would be produced in the new building, but an image that would be blurrier the closer one gets. To achieve this, a computer algorithm scanned drawings of the original to create a new drawing of parallel lines and inserting a "parametric jitter" each time it crossed the trusses.