Wilmina

Historical Strata, Material Traces, and Nature

Kantstraße is West Berlin's flagship for pan-Asian cuisine, an address for design stores and major axis in the city's history. This noisy city boulevard is more than two and a half kilometres long-an harbour of various nationalities, lined with buildings from different eras. The building that now stands at number 79 is a paradigmatic example of urban development and sophisticated architectural transformation emphasizing the sensitive engagement with history and its material and cultural substance. The criminal court and a jail annex were erected as freestanding structures after designs by the architects Adolf Bürckner and Eduard Fürstenau in 1896. The street-facing wing was in use by a court of lay assessors and, most recently, it accommodated the Charlottenburg-Wilmersdorf land registry. The rear building, too, figured in the history of the German criminal justice system for decades; during the Second World War, it served as a prison for women members of the resistance. After the jail was closed in 1985, the building was repurposed as an archive for the registry office. The listed ensemble of buildings and courtyards was transformed, expanded and reprogrammed by Grüntuch Ernst architects. They have now transformed it into a cultural oasis amid the city's perpetual bustle, which opened to the public in 2022. Today Wilmina houses a hotel, a restaurant, and the Amtsalon, a transdisciplinary venue for contemporary art.

The book documents the site's history and illustrates the scrupulously cautious alterations to the historic structure. With historic and contemporary photographs and texts by Almut Grüntuch-Ernst and Armand Grüntuch, Tatiana Bilbao, Anh-Linh Ngo, Norman Ohler, Matthias Sauerbruch and Florian Siebeck, among others, it presents a comprehensive portrait of a multifaceted piece of Berlin's urban history and building culture.