The project is intended to have the qualities of a working building; open, robust and with large window openings that allow light to penetrate the deep floors. While gentrification has started to break this part of the city’s relationship with its industrial past, the form and the programme of the foundation’s new building goes some way towards bridging these two worlds.

The building is as compact as possible; larger floors house the bakery and packing departments at the base of the building and a stack of four smaller floors accommodate other facilities above. The south, west and east faces of the building are lined with balconies made in fine, repeated pre-cast concrete elements. Part palazzo, part warehouse, the front façade of the building onto Heinrichstrasse is clad in pre-cast concrete plates that stretch from floor to floor with a cast relief of shells, the symbol of St Jakob. In these ways the building shares some qualities with the cast-iron buildings of downtown New York.

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