The Sport- und Erholungszentrum, known to Berliners as the SEZ, opened on Landsberger Allee in March 1981 as the showpiece leisure complex of the German Democratic Republic (GDR). Behind a long wall of glass, a chain of pools stepped down through the interior under painted red steel trusses: a wave pool, a cascade, a paddling basin, a solarium. The building has stood empty since 2002, and the Berlin Senate now intends to demolish it. SEZ: The Im/Possibility of an Island, at BHROX Bauhaus Reuse, gathers the original drawings, photographs, and presentation model to make the case for what would be lost.
SEZ Berlin Technical Information
- ArchitectsHOCHTIEF AG, lead architect Gunter Reiss
- LocationLandsberger Allee, Friedrichshain, Berlin, Germany
- ExhibitionSEZ—The Im/Possibility of an Island (until September 20th, 2026)
- Curators TalkSeptember 17, 2026, 7:00 p.m. (The Future of the SEZ as a Third Place, Built Nature, and Fun Palace)
- Project Years1977 – 1981
- Photographs© Deutscher Werkbund Berlin, © Ulrich Wuest
With its terraced pool area, staggered roof spaces, and spatial logic, it formed a self-contained cosmos.
– Kay Fingerle and Ludwig Heimbach, curators
SEZ as an Urban Island in Late Socialist Berlin
Opened in 1981 on Landsberger Allee, the Sport and Recreation Center, or SEZ, assembled swimming, sport, health services, dining, and recreation within a single civic interior. Its scale and program exceeded that of a municipal swimming pool. The complex was conceived as a destination that could suspend ordinary routines, offering a carefully staged environment of water, vegetation, movement, and collective leisure within the dense housing districts of East Berlin.
The project emerged from a politically charged exchange between East and West Berlin. Designed by HOCHTIEF AG under lead architect Gunter Reiss, it brought West Berlin engineering and planning expertise into a state-sponsored project for the German Democratic Republic. Its bright yellow roof bands, blue-framed glazing, faceted roof lights, and planted water terraces established a conspicuous contrast with the repetitive concrete housing estates nearby. Rather than blending into its setting, the SEZ constructed an internal climate and visual order that framed leisure as a public urban service.
An Interior Landscape of Water, Terraces, and Light
The principal swimming hall was organized as an artificial topography. Wave pools, swimming pools, paddling pools, cascades, bubble pools, solariums, and outdoor basins formed a continuous sequence rather than isolated rooms. Technical sections reveal the depth of this construction: beneath the stepped pool landscape lay service tunnels, water infrastructure, waterproofing systems, and structural support. The public experience of a naturalized terrain relied on a highly controlled mechanical and architectural apparatus.
Broad terraces, bridges, planting beds, cafes, galleries, and seating zones allowed visitors to occupy the hall without entering the water. This arrangement expanded the building’s social role. Bathing became only one activity among watching, resting, eating, circulating, and gathering. Above, triangulated roof structures and faceted glazed lanterns admitted daylight across the interior, while red steel trusses, timber soffits, and extensive glazing produced an atmosphere closer to a greenhouse or covered landscape than a conventional sports enclosure.
Color, Structure, and the Architecture of Leisure
Original studies by Reiss demonstrate that color was treated as an architectural system rather than surface decoration. A seasonal palette organized yellows, blues, terracotta, brick red, olive green, lilac, and pale grey-green into coordinated fields. The scheme linked the street elevation to the interior landscape, where coloured tiles, painted steel, furniture, signage, and lighting established a sequence of visual cues across the large complex. Chromatic contrast supported orientation while also separating the SEZ from the restrained material vocabulary of its surrounding urban fabric.
The building’s material language joined industrial assembly with deliberately informal elements. Red tubular steel trusses remained visible among white ventilation ducts and glazed balustrades. Timber slat soffits moderated the hard surfaces of the structural frame, while mosaic-clad terraces gave the pool edges a tactile, almost geological character. Spherical pendant lamps introduced a domestic scale over the water, and tubular steel furniture extended the same language into seating and waiting areas. The result was neither purely monumental nor purely recreational: its technical systems were exposed, yet absorbed into a spatial setting designed for prolonged occupation.
Vacancy, Reuse, and the Future of a Civic Interior
Now vacant and heavily deteriorated, the SEZ poses a difficult question for assessing late twentieth-century public architecture. Its value extends beyond individual finishes or formal features. The building contains a large-span structure, deep service zones, layered circulation, and a programmatic capacity that could accommodate changing forms of collective use. Contemporary photographs of drained pools, damaged soffits, graffiti, and surviving mosaic work make the effects of abandonment visible, but they also register the persistence of the underlying spatial framework.
The exhibition at BHROX Bauhaus Reuse places archival drawings and historic photographs beside the deteriorated presentation model and recent documentation of the building. This comparison avoids treating decay as proof of obsolescence. Instead, it asks whether the existing shell can be understood as an adaptable civic interior, capable of supporting leisure, health, culture, and other forms of social infrastructure. Installed in a pavilion assembled from reused facade elements, the exhibition also highlights the material consequences of demolition, including embodied resources, waste, and the loss of spaces whose public significance cannot be measured solely through redevelopment calculations.
About HOCHTIEF AG
HOCHTIEF AG designed the Berlin Sports and Recreation Center in West Berlin, with Gunter Reiss as lead architect. The project combined a large-span structural system, faceted glazed roof lights, exposed red steel trusses, timber soffits, and an interior landscape of pools, terraces, planting, and public leisure spaces.
Credits and Additional Notes
- Client: German Democratic Republic, GDR
- Exhibition Curators: Prof. Kay Fingerle and Ludwig Heimbach
- Exhibition Organisers: Deutscher Werkbund Berlin and BHROX Bauhaus reuse
- Other contributors: Poster by Prof. Nikolaus Ott
- Other contributors: Exhibition execution by students at RheinMain University of Applied Sciences, Prof. Kay Fingerle, Annika Herr, and Marlen Breuer
- Other contributors: JACOB I REISCHEL, ludwig heimbach architektur, and zukunftsgeraeusche Huber Winter GbR
- Other contributors: Contributors Gunter Reiss, Verein der Freunde und Forderer des Stadtmuseums Berlin e.V., Stadtmuseum Berlin, Leibniz IRS, HOCHTIEF AG, Ilse Hahn, Volker Schutsch, Dieter Urbach, Ulrich Wust, Gerd Danigel, Rolf Zollner, Wolfgang Kil, Volkrad Drechsler, gmp Architekten von Gerkan, Marg und Partner, Karl-Heinz Kraemer, Jessica Schweitzer, Susanne Lorenz, Prof. Ariane Rontz, Berlinische Galerie, Bundesstiftung Bauakademie, Bayerische Verwaltung der staatlichen Schlosser, WBM, and bpk-Fotoarchiv
- Other contributors: Photography by Deutscher Werkbund Berlin
- Research references or publications: Urban Development Plan for Housing 2040; IBA Berlin 2034-37; Neues Deutschland; Raum; Sport-und Erholungszentrum Berlin
