If you take the train to Cottbus, shortly before the main station you will pass high storage buildings on the right hand side, which can be seen behind dense vegetation south of the railway line. The two old warehouses in the district of Ströbitz have stood empty since the fall of the Berlin Wall and are now surrounded by wild ruderal vegetation, blackberry bushes and birches.

The site, although conveniently located, appears to be fallen out of time, abandoned and far from urban life. It forms a kind of “counter-place" where apparently different orders and relations prevail. Here one could be nowhere and everywhere, in another place without local reference or in the romantically transfigured “wild utopia" of a non-place within a city, where everything seems possible.

We approach the design of a storage building through the discursive process of a participatory workshop of ideas and analyses of storage typologies and realised projects. We want to develop architectural scenarios and think of a possible new narrative for this urban heterotopia.