Berlin DE - Courtyard

A Green Lung in the Heart of Berlin – Courtyard Design at Campus Hackescher Markt

City summers are getting hotter, which makes it all the more valuable to create places that cool, shelter and invite people to linger outdoors. As a landscape architecture atelier in Berlin, we found a design answer to exactly that in the courtyard at Campus Hackescher Markt: a place that casts shade, cools the air and makes the outdoors genuinely worth spending time in, right in the middle of the city — even as the urban climate keeps warming.

A Microclimate Against Urban Heat

That idea grew into a green universe — a microclimate of its own at the heart of the office complex. A dense leaf canopy, the cooling effect of evaporation and shade-giving crowns turn the courtyard into a zone of tangible relief the moment the city begins to glow with summer heat. A courtyard that invites the people working here to open a window, breathe deeply and let their eyes wander into the green. Somewhere you don't simply pass through but stay a while — and which reveals itself anew with every turn of the season. This is precisely where good landscape architecture proves itself: in the ability to turn a functional courtyard into a living retreat.

Rare Plants for an Unusual Urban Climate

The courtyard's sheltered position and Berlin's mild urban climate opened up unusual design possibilities for the planting scheme. We were able to work with rare woody plants, uncommon in the city, that find ideal conditions in this climatic niche: magnificent magnolias, free-flowering camellias, fragrant osmanthus, delicate styrax trees, evergreen oaks, the elegant tiered viburnum and the exotic-looking Tetrapanax set shifting accents of form, scent and colour throughout the year — while contributing to the natural cooling of the microclimate. This careful plant selection is, to us, the core of any good garden design: right for the site, varied across the seasons, and tuned to the particular microclimate.

Landscape Architecture as an Answer to Climate Change

What emerged is an oasis of calm and coolness amid the noise and pulse of the city — a retreat that shows how considered green and landscape planning can actively meet the consequences of climate change. As landscape architects in Berlin, we see this as our task: to shape urban spaces so that they don't merely withstand a changing climate but offer active solutions to it. For us at Atelier Wehrle, this is the heart of our work as garden designers — creating spaces that give urban people back what ever-hotter summers otherwise take from them: shade, cool air, and somewhere to breathe right outside the door.