PSD Bank Offices – Berlin
Ester Bruzkus Architekten included playful prints and colors on a sleek backdrop for the PSD Bank offices in Berlin, Germany.
Located inside a historic post office in Berlin-Friedenau, the design transforms the bank into a generous and welcoming neighborhood center. In addition to traditional banking services like ATMs, consulting rooms, and help desks, there are also unexpected spaces for a bank: a café, a colorful community living room, an interior garden, exhibition spaces, and public meeting rooms. While most banks are closing their brick and mortar locations, the PSD Bank has opened as a neighborhood center to welcome everyone in the community.
The project has a strong social, formal, and material idea. Socially, the room presents itself as a comfortable living room, with a welcoming café at the front, inviting guests to linger and feel at home. In particular, the inclusive design is intended to appeal to guests, such as seniors, for whom modern digital banking may feel impersonal and alienating. Formally, the design introduces new architectural “boxes inside boxes” that sit within the restored banking hall and have a dialogue between new and old. Materially, the design mixes fresh new materials with historic ones – warm woods, shiny metals, pickled woods, terrazzo with recycled content – mixed with historic stone flooring, original dark wood columns, and historically accurate colors found under a hundred years of paint layers.
As a bank dedicated to the community where it is located, the design features local and German material manufacturers, furniture companies, suppliers, and crafts. And the design reuses and recycles as much as possible – so the historic shell was repaired – the flooring, the original wood paneled columns, and the plaster ceiling.
But the project is not just a historic renovation: it is intended to feel new and fresh and contemporary and vibrant and connected to the active life of the community. New materials live in happy dialogue with the old. And young and old alike are welcomed into their own neighborhood community center.
Design: Ester Bruzkus Architekten
Design Team: Ester Bruzkus, Peter Greenberg, Edo Albano, Giulia Di Marco, Stephanie Meine, Ana Knežević, Arianna Petrulli, Lorenzo Soldi, Max Werner
Photography: Noshe
