It takes a very specific kind of sensibility to live in the ruins of monstrous regime, but art collectors Karen and Christian Boros have it. The couple and their kids live in a bunker with 1.83m-thick concrete walls, originally built to hold 3000 people during air raids in Berlin, in 1942.
This is the Boros Residence, a 9754m² bunker in Berlin that now plays host to the Boros and their kids, who live in a sprawling penthouse designed by Jens Casper. In the video tour below, pointed out today by ArchDaily, we meet the family and get a tour of their home, which includes a massive amount of art, both contemporary and otherwise, including a painting of Mary and Jesus owned by the first Medici Pope (it was “probably too pornographic, so the Vatican sold it,” says Christian).
ArchDaily’s Gili Merin has more about the building’s history:
In case of attack, the bunker, with 180cm (six feet) walls and a three meter (nine feet) deep ceiling, could house and protect 3000 seated people distributed over five floors. The design by Karl Bonatz strictly followed the guidelines of Albert Speer, the Third Reich’s head architect and a member of Hitler’s inner circle. In the years following the fall of the Nazi regime, the bunker embraced varying functions — from a tropical fruit wearhouse (known to locals as the “Banana Bunker”) to the locale for hard-core fetish and techno parties in the 1990’s — until it was forced to shut down by the police in 1995.
If you’re in Berlin, it seems as though the galleries in some of its 80 rooms are actually often open to visitors, too.
We’ve seen former air raid bunkers converted into all manner of spaces over the past few years: In fact, in Hamburg, a former Nazi bunker was just reopened as a renewable energy plant. Living inside one of these space, though, is whole different proposition. Would you consider it? Tell me below. [Freunde von Freunden; ArchDaily]
Lead image: Ailine Liefeld for Freunde von Freunden.