Albert Einstein is a pop star among scientists. Affable, with an affinity for the media and eager for discussion, he gives public lectures. He uses the rooms of the labour movement in Germany in today’s BEAM, formerly known as Schicklerhaus, from 1930 to 1933. Albert Einstein, Nobel Prize winner and cult figure of the Golden Twenties is committed – with a passion for his profession as he passes on new knowledge of matter, space and time… and his ‘baby’, the theory of relativity, to those present. .

And anyone who listens to him knows: there is something that emanates from this person. His radiance fills rooms. A radiance that can still be felt within these walls, and which finds its expression in the architectural reinterpretation.

The company Hiller & Kuhlmann built the office building in 1910 on a floor area of 4360 m² with three main courtyards and four atriums. On the ground floor there were shops, on the other floors were offices of various companies or parties. Thus, from 1917 the Berlin office of the political party USPD was located here.

From 1930 to 1933, the Marxist Workers’ School (MASCH), founded in 1926, used some of the rooms in the house, where Albert Einstein and Hermann Duncker also gave popular science lectures.

After 1945, the war-damaged building was first occupied by the German Interior and Foreign Trade Food (DIA) on the orders of the Allied Commandantur Berlin.

For a long time, the office building contained a commemorative plaque announcing to visitors that the founding congress of the FSJ had taken place here on 26/27 October 1918, and that Karl Liebknecht had addressed the delegates at the congress.

Klosterstraße is the nucleus and the origin of the city of Berlin. And BEAM marks the entrance to this historic quarter that is on its way to completely reinventing itself. Here, a completely new quarter is being built on Molkenmarkt, envisaged as an innovative campus for the city community. When the old is united with the new, the future can be shaped.

Klosterstraße is a quiet and approximately 430 meter long crossroads of Grunerstraße. It runs in a slight curve to the south to the Spree, crossing Parochialstraße and Stralauer Straße and reaching Rolandufer.

Klosterstraße originally started at the Neuer Markt at the Marienkirche. From there it ran in an arc in a south-easterly direction parallel to the medieval city wall to Stralauer Straße. The northern end initially formed a dead end, which was bordered by the city wall. After its demolition it led to the Neue Friedrichstraße.

Today, Klosterstraße exists only on the southern section of its former course.