BWGTBLD’s Berlin Office: When a Workplace Becomes a Gallery
A row of computer screens sits beneath framed photographs and paintings. Beyond an open doorway, another working room comes into view, its wall occupied by a pale sculptural relief. At BWGTBLD’s Berlin headquarters, art shares the spaces of everyday work. The architectural question is how these rooms accommodate concentration, display and visitors without losing their character.
An old address with changing uses
The production company occupies premises at Neue Schönhauser Straße 13 in Berlin’s Mitte district. According to Ellie Stathaki’s account in Wallpaper*, the building was designed by Alfred Messel in the early 1890s for communal dining and later accommodated other uses, including a cinema. Philipp Ramhofer, who founded BWGTBLD in 2012, has brought workspaces and an art collection into this inherited setting.
The façade still carries an inscription identifying its former coffee and dining-hall association. Broad ground-floor arches establish a weighty base, while ornament, projecting windows and a pitched roof divide the upper elevation into smaller episodes. These details make the building legible as something with a life before its current occupants. The photographed ground-floor shopfronts also caution against reading the entire property as a single, exclusively corporate frontage.
This is a useful starting point for understanding the relationship between historic fabric and new occupation. Reuse involves deciding which spatial qualities can continue to work, as well as which surfaces should remain. Here, the tall openings and distinct rooms provide a framework for arranging contemporary objects without requiring every part of the interior to speak the same visual language.
The doorway becomes part of the exhibition
In the photographs, a white panelled door opens beside a low orange storage unit. A painting in the adjoining room is visible through the opening. The door therefore does two jobs: it separates spaces and frames a second view. An artwork can be encountered before its room is entered, giving the interior a sense of depth that a single photograph of an isolated wall would miss.
For an office, such connections create possibilities for informal awareness between rooms. For an exhibition, they establish successive viewpoints. Those uses do not always align: the route that encourages someone to stop and look may also pass close to a working desk. The quality of a shared office-gallery depends on how occupation and circulation are managed, not simply on the number of works displayed.
Material contrast at the scale of the body
The strongest material contrasts occur below the ornate ceiling line. Reflective metal tables stand against timber flooring; upholstered seating receives patches of sunlight; bright storage units sit beneath paintings on pale walls. The eye moves between objects with sharply different weights, textures and levels of reflectivity.
A rounded metal table seen through another doorway gathers chairs around a common centre. Its broad cylindrical supports make the table read as a substantial object rather than a visually weightless surface. Around it, flowers, fruit and small vessels introduce the scale of ordinary use. This is where the arrangement becomes more persuasive as a workplace: furniture offers somewhere to sit, meet and pause while remaining part of the visual composition.
Photographs establish these visual relationships, but they cannot establish acoustic comfort, screen glare throughout the day or how well the rooms support confidential conversations. Those remain practical tests for any workplace combining reflective surfaces, open connections and concentrated desk work.
Public access is a matter of operation
Wallpaper* reports that the collection is opened on selected weekends through bookable visits, with tours led by Ramhofer and the company’s curator. The distinction matters: this is a working interior with periodic access, rather than a gallery whose doors can be assumed to be open every day.
Its earlier communal purpose gives that arrangement an interesting tension. A building once associated with collective dining now accommodates a private company that occasionally invites others inside. Cultural access is being introduced through programming. Its public value depends on the actual opportunities to visit, who can book and how comfortably visitors share the building with its regular users.
A workplace that can hold more than one identity
Alongside other examples of cultural activity occupying an existing building, BWGTBLD raises a question that extends beyond office styling: how much of a city’s interior life can be shared without turning every space into a dedicated public institution?
The photographs offer a convincing visual answer at the scale of the room. Artworks, furniture and workstations remain individually recognisable, held together by the older architecture. The harder task is sustaining that coexistence in use. A successful office-gallery needs both a reason to look and the conditions that allow people to keep working.
Project reporting: Ellie Stathaki, Wallpaper*, 10 September 2026. Photography: Robert Rieger.
