Berlin's Techno Archive Finds a Home in a Power Station Basement

For the first time, 3,400 square meters of previously unused basement beneath a former East Berlin power station have opened to the public. Berlin studio Office ParkScheerbarth developed the concept for the space together with Dimitri Hegemann, the founder of the Tresor club, as the permanent home of the Living Archive of techno culture — a project Hegemann first announced in 2015.

That's an eleven-year gap between announcement and physical opening. The delay partly explains why the studio approached the commission as a test rather than a finished statement.

What did the exhibition actually do?

The archive got its first full-scale trial with the exhibition "Dancefloors After 1989." It ran for five weeks, and Office ParkScheerbarth handled two jobs at once: securing the permit for the space and designing the exhibition itself.

The material constraints shaped the design. According to the architects, the studio built the show "using material the building itself supplied." In other words, the former power station's basement didn't just host the exhibition — it furnished it.

Who is behind the project?

Office ParkScheerbarth is a Berlin studio led by lead architects Moojin Park and Benjamin Scheerbarth. The firm worked directly with Hegemann, whose Tresor club has been central to Berlin's techno scene since the early 1990s, to translate his archive concept into an architectural program.

Photographs of the completed space come from Jan Bitter.

Why does a basement matter here?

The building's history is the point. This is a former East Berlin power station — a structure from the city's divided decades — now hosting an archive of a culture that, as the exhibition title signals, took shape after 1989. The chronology lines up: the wall fell, abandoned industrial spaces became clubs, and now one of those spaces holds the record of that transformation.

The 3,400-square-meter figure gives a sense of scale. That's roughly half a football pitch of floor area, all of it below ground and all of it previously inaccessible to the public.

What happens after the five-week test?

The "Dancefloors After 1989" run served as a proof of concept for the permanent Living Archive. The permit, the fit-out strategy and the material reuse all passed through a real exhibition cycle rather than a theoretical brief.

If the full archive program proceeds on this foundation, Berlin gains a permanent institution documenting techno culture inside the industrial fabric that produced it — with Hegemann's 2015 vision finally standing on 3,400 square meters of concrete.