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ARCHITECTURE

The mobile Berlin brewery made out of shipping containers

Part pop-up, part up-cycling, this new brewery in the German capital is using some of the city's most distinct traits of reuse and re-purposing to create something new.

Published: 21 April 2017 16:09 CEST
The mobile Berlin brewery made out of shipping containers
Photo: Graft architecture.

The harsh, steel, industrial facade of the BRLO brewery in Berlin’s gentrifying Kreuzberg district is a stark contrast from the typical, wood-panelled gemütlich beer halls of German tradition.

But that’s perhaps exactly what makes this new beer house so perfectly Berlin: it’s rejection of norms, embrace of repurposing, and willingness to innovate – even with something as eyebrow-raising as shipping containers.

The brewery fully opened in January on a formerly empty plot right at the edge of the popular Gleisdreiecke Park. It is designed a bit like a child building with Legos: metal containers stacked atop one another in a neat, strategic layout of about 600 square metres. And also like Legos, it was created to be easily disassembled, or even conveniently be moved elsewhere.

“The flexibility makes it beautiful,” says Lars Krückeberg of architecture firm Graft, the brainchild of the container design.

Krückeberg founded Graft in Los Angeles nearly 20 years ago with Wolfram Putz and Thomas Willemeit, two other German architects, and they have since brought their modern creations to cities all over the world, from Malaysia, to Dubai, to Norway, and even helped bring to life the Will Smith music video for Y2K.

The team had already experimented with containers in other works, first using them for interior rooms within a conference centre in Los Angeles. But Krückeberg said they weren’t allowed to use shipping containers for the building’s structure.

Then in 2012 they opened an artist space with the group Platoon in Berlin using containers, catching the eye of local BRLO craft beer company, who then approached Graft about the idea for the brewery.

The containers are a relatively more affordable option for construction, and also allowed the project to be completed in a much shorter amount of time. While the beer garden opened last summer, the fully functioning brewery and restaurant launched officially about six months later.

And the easy maneuverability of the containers also means that the brewery is mobile: the beermakers have only been granted temporary use of the land for the next three to five years. After that, they would be able to either easily dismantle the brewery and sell it on, or completely move it to a new location.

That’s why Krückeberg refers to it as a “pop-up”.

“Pop-up architecture has always existed – think about medieval marketplaces, or in Renaissance Italy – just not that much. But more and more people are doing it,” he explained.

While the concept of a temporary brewery might sound quite novel, creating such ephemeral installations is a beloved Berlin pastime. Currently there's also an ongoing massive art exhibition, which was “created to be destroyed”, occupying a five-storey former bank that is slated to be torn down this summer.

Containers do, however, have their drawbacks. They are cheaper, but not as inexpensive as some might expect, especially in comparison to their worth at the height of the 2008 financial crisis when a slowdown in trade meant there was a nearly endless supply of them not being used, Krückeberg noted.

They’re also not easy to insulate, so they can mean very cold winters, and very hot summers. And Krückeberg is very opposed to them being used in housing for these reasons.

Plus the design idea hasn’t gone over completely positively in reviews.

“There was one article that called it a cliche, which I think is stupid,” Krückeberg says.

“This is what Berlin is good at, so it’s not a cliche – it’s actually true.”

But overall Krückeberg is quite excited about the brewery’s completion, even deciding to celebrate his own birthday at the venue recently.

“It’s always great if you can think about cities in a different way, that they can be a little bit lighter and they don’t have to be built in stone to be forever.

“They can be built to change,” he added – another aspect very much reflective of Berlin, a city which has withstood war, division and constant transformation over the past century.

“We love Berlin because it is different,” he continued.

“Berlin is about fractures and changes and pluralism, different ideas and different people living together. That is for me what is represented with this small project.”

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WORKING IN NORWAY

‘There was noone doing it’: The story behind Oslo’s only English bookstore

Six months after launching Oslo's only English language bookstore, Seattle native Indigo Trigg-Hauger doesn't regret a thing.

Published: 30 April 2024 15:05 CEST
'There was noone doing it': The story behind Oslo's only English bookstore

“I really love it. I love that I can finally use my communication skills for something that is purely my own and I just love being in the store, meeting new people, and getting to recommend books,” she tells The Local. 

Prismatic Pages, in the happening Oslo district of Grünerløkka, is already building up a steady following both among English speakers and readers and among Norwegians, with its packed schedule of events like book swaps, book clubs, and silent reading evenings.  

“The English speaking and reading community in Oslo in general is becoming more and more aware of it, and I have some repeat customers who are really spreading the word, which is amazing,” Trigg-Hauger says.

“But it’s sort of a slow burn. Even though all of our events have been standing room only, there are still people coming in every day who say ‘I didn’t know the store was here’, or, like, ‘someone just told me about this’, so I can see that we still have a lot of potential people to reach.” 

Trigg-Hauger inherited her fascination with Norway from her mother, who studied in Oslo as an exchange student and still speaks rusty Norwegian. 

“I always had the impression that we were Norwegian when I was a very young kid, and then I grew up and realised ‘oh, actually, no, she just loves Norway’.” 

She studied Scandinavian Studies at The University of Washington, came away from her year-long exchange year at the University of Oslo with a Bachelor’s degree in History, and then returned to Oslo a year later to do a Master’s degree in Peace and Conflict Studies. 

“I learned Norwegian pretty quickly after I arrived, just because I had a little bit of a basis and I did an intensive course as well, so I am fluent and I have dual citizenship now,” she says. 

These language skills, together with the journalism she’d been doing on the side throughout her studies meant she fell on her feet on graduation, getting a job in communications at the prestigious Peace Research Institute Oslo (PRIO) almost immediately, and then moving on three years later to a similar job at Norfund, Norway’s state development finance institution. 

“After only a year, I realised, this just isn’t for me anymore,” she says of the Norfund job. “I’m really good at communications, but I was tired of only doing it for other people’s projects and not my own. I think I’m very creative and independent. So I needed to do something a bit more flexible and something that was more driven by me.” 

Around this time, during coffee with a friend, she mentioned that she had worked in a bookshop in her home town, Leavenworth, for a year between studies. 

“I said, ‘that’s the only job I’ve ever really enjoyed’, and she said ‘well, you should just open a bookstore’. To which obviously I said ‘that’s crazy’, but then I actually did start to think about it.” 

Indigo Trigg-Hauger ran a book stall in May 2023 as part of her market research. Photo: Prismatic Pages

What helped push her to actually do it was a new scheme run by the local Grünerløkka city area called Lokalstart, where those accepted receive three months of free training followed by continued mentoring to start a business. 

“That really just, like, pushed me to do it,” she remembers. “Part of the course that for me was very helpful was that my course leader and my mentor encouraged me to do some market research. So I actually started in, just about a year ago, in May, I started doing just a table at a local market and I was seeing, like, quite a bit of enthusiasm.”

She realised that while Oslo had several independent bookstores, such as a queer bookstore, and an anarchist bookstore, there wasn’t an English-only one, and certainly not one which did what independent bookstores do in the US. 

“There was no one doing what I wanted to do, which was used and new mixed together and buying used books from customers, which in the US is pretty common for independent bookstores,” she said. 

So last August she handed in her notice, although she worked until the end of the year, and in December she finally opened Prismatic Pages, raising more than 60,000 kroner through the Norwegian crowdfunding site Spleis.

“I ran a crowdfunding campaign, which was also very helpful because I could both market the business and kind of get people’s buy-in, literally.”

She wanted Prismatic Pages to feel more open as a space than more traditional bookshops that she feels can be claustrophobic and worked with an interior designer friend to select the right colour scheme, furnishings and layout. 

“A lot of my inspiration just comes from the bookstores I grew up going to in Seattle, where I’m from, and also the store that I worked at, which was in a small town called Leavenworth, where we would also have small events. It really was like a community space where, of course, we had a lot of tourists and visitors, but also a lot of repeat customers. I was a repeat customer before I was an employee.” 

As for the books, she likes it to be an eclectic mix: something for everyone but still curated. 

“When it comes to books, I think humans are the best algorithm. Of course, some of it is personal taste, but I try not to let that get too much in the way of my selection. It’s a complicated mix of new releases, classics, maybe overlooked releases from the past. And then things that customers tell me about, and I just try to read up a lot on what other people are reading, you know, articles that recommend different lists of books.”

“Of course, sometimes there are themes, like, for example, Pride Month is coming up. I already have a queer literature section, but I’ll be beefing that up a little bit for June, and with the Easter crime season, we had a lot more crime in.” 

Prismatic Pages is already, she feels, a social space of a sort that is unusual in Oslo, particularly when the store holds events when people bring their own books and swap with one another.

“I love that people really start talking to each other,” she said of those events. “It’s kind of rare in Norway for strangers just to talk to each other. But they’ll start picking up each other’s books and discussing them, and that’s really nice.” 

The constant stream of customers also suits her sociable nature in a way her largely desk-bound communication jobs did not. 

“I’ve always been really social anyway. So I’m really active in many different activities. So it’s very nice that a lot of people come by from different areas of my life, all the way back from, like, 10 years ago, when I was an exchange student, up to my most recent jobs. I guess it’s good for my socially extroverted self to get to see new and old faces.”

What remains to be seen, she admits, is whether her new profession of bookseller will be work in the long run. 

“Time will tell if it is financially sustainable,” she says. “I do pay myself something, but it’s not really quite enough yet. So, you know, I don’t want people to think, ‘oh, it’s all just been rainbows and butterflies’. Because, you know, opening a small business is a huge challenge.” 

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