Brandenburg State Parliament

The vision of rebuilding the Potsdam City Palace became a reality in 2014. With his winning design, Prof. Peter Kulka decided to restore the exterior largely to the original Knobelsdorff design and to give the interior of the parliament building a contemporary look. The outer edges of the new building correspond to the historical floor plan, but are enlarged inwards in the south and side wings to create sufficient space for the plenary chamber, representative halls, offices and parliamentary group rooms.

The 11,500^m2 building site had its pitfalls. Numerous archaeological finds dating back to the Stone Age and 500 years of castle and palace history were hidden in the ground. Large areas of the south wing were declared a primary conservation area by the monument protection authorities. With these constraints, some of the building loads had to be redirected via special constructions. The bored piles could only be inserted after explicit approval for each individual pile.

The supporting structure of the City Palace consists of a reinforced concrete skeleton construction with very slender outer walls and, in the central areas of the plenary hall and the foyers, complex wide-span structures. The flat ceilings span up to approx. 16.0 m using prestressing technology and the plenary hall was designed to be column-free over approx. 24.0 m using wall-like beams.