Mäusebunker

The Freie Universität needed a central home for its laboratory animals, and in the mid-1960s Gerd and Magdalena Hänska began designing one. Their scheme was complete by 1967. The building would breed its own animals under controlled hygiene and house the experiments under the same roof, a brief with few precedents in Europe. A two-storey test building on Bäkestraße, later called the Kleiner Mäusebunker, tried out the construction first. It has since been demolished. Work started in 1971 on marshy ground near the Teltowkanal. The foundations alone took two years and 1,300 driven piles, and their cost almost doubled. By March 1975 the estimate had climbed to 93.7 million DM, and construction stopped that autumn. Finance senator Klaus Riebschläger called it Berlin's "first public building ruin". The site stood idle from 1976 to 1978. Work resumed in 1978, the fit-out ran four more years, and the labs opened on 27 February 1982. The form follows the services. Plant floors alternate with lab floors, so every second level holds air handling. Outside, the plant floors show as rows of blue intake pipes and the lab floors as tetrahedral window dormers. The cross-section is a stretched, stepped pyramid with walls inclined at 18.5°. Inside, small cell-like rooms line the corridors, finished in stainless steel and tile. The Charité took over the building in 2003 and moved its animal research to a new building in Berlin-Buch, which opened in 2019. In 2017 it filed to demolish both the Mäusebunker and the Hygiene Institute next door. A petition, open letters from architects and a takeover offer from Arno Brandlhuber and Johann König followed. The Landesdenkmalamt launched the Modellverfahren Mäusebunker in 2021 to study reuse and listed the building on 25 May 2023. As of the October 2025 public debate, the administration was preparing a Konzeptverfahren, and no new use had been announced.