Along the western edge of Potsdamer Platz, 485 metres of sloping lawn sit largely unused, and Kinzo Architektenwants to turn that idle strip into a spine of sport and public life anchored by a 15-by-100-metre outdoor pool. The proposal for Tilla-Durieux-Park is self-initiated, without an official commission behind it. It’s pitched less as a finished design than as an opening move in a public conversation.
Tilla-Durieux-Park occupies one of Berlin’s most visible addresses, hemmed in by offices, hotels and transit that keep the district busy without giving anyone a reason to linger. The timing sharpens the point: this summer, as the city’s outdoor pools turn visitors away at capacity, the space for exactly what Berlin lacks has been sitting empty the whole time — the same basic instinct to turn leftover urban space into public water sits behind MVRDV’s Tainan Spring in Taiwan, built into the void of a demolished shopping mall.
A 100-metre pool forms the spine of the proposal, flanked by timber sun decks, changing rooms and a kiosk. Around it, Kinzo has arranged padel courts, basketball, beach volleyball, calisthenics areas and a water playground, with a tree grove anchored by a long communal table for anyone not there to swim — a similar instinct to let water, light and greenery structure everyday public life shaped BIG’s public plazas in Ørestad, Copenhagen.
A winter membrane changes the pool’s season rather than closing it — a translucent skin stretched over timber arches would cover the basin for a heated, light-filled swim beneath the snow, while the grove shifts into fire pits and a seasonal market. The studio frames the project as everyday infrastructure rather than a one-off event space, closer in spirit to the close-range public life of Copenhagen’s Israels Plads than to a festival installation.
Kinzo’s co-founder Karim El-Ishmawi said in a statement that “Tilla-Durieux-Park can become the living room of Potsdamer Platz – all year round, for everyone who lives and works here. Our proposal is an invitation to everyone who wants to help shape this place.”
Looking further south, the studio points to a future pedestrian bridge across the Landwehr Canal that could link the park to Park am Gleisdreieck, closing a missing stretch in Berlin’s north-south green corridor between Tiergarten and Kreuzberg. But the scheme is deliberately conceived as a standalone intervention that could be built in the short term regardless of that larger connection — less a finished masterplan than an open invitation to the city, its politics and its property owners.
Tilla-Durieux-Park Activation by Kinzo Architekten | Location: Potsdamer Platz, Berlin, Germany — Status: Self-initiated proposal, unbuilt — Key materials: Timber, Membrane