In an era when rising threats put increasing pressure on security demands in state office buildings, the public trust in these same governmental institutions is on the decline, owing to a sense of detachment and lack of transparency.
This detachment partially stems from the functional and physical separation of people’s civic and political lives, leaving public officials as uncountable, a separated class unresponsive to the everyday people, who in turn can glance little of the everyday working of their government.
In other words: it is easier to pass unfavourable legislation when you never interact with the common people and sit in your fortress hidden from protests. For these reasons, the future must see the creation of new governmental spaces that are public in nature, but also safeguarded from new dynamic threads. New design approaches in established typologies need to be sought to answer these relationship questions that stem from new state, societal, and technological developments.
The Graduation Project ‘Fortress Without Barriers‘ seek to explore these issues of security and accessibility by using a scenario involving the design of a new Federal Ministry of Defence headquarters in Berlin. At first glance this typology might be perceived as ill suited to the integration of public life, even agitative. But rather the project places it as the ultimate test for whether these values can be effectively expressed in an urban context. Defence Ministry being the most prime domain of security, on the scale of city within a city, and placing the most private and secured programme imaginable alongside the proposed public functions.

This thesis investigates the evolution in the perception of Brutalist architecture based on depictions of physical and fictional examples in popular cinema. Looking into how societal and aesthetical factors resulted in brutalist architecture, an egalitarian and utopian movement at its inception, taking on the stereotypical role of the dystopian-future aesthetic in popular media subconscious. This thesis analyses the foundational ideas of the Brutalist movement and examined several film examples to establish this assumption. Illustrating the main points, and its adoption throughout cinema, by using notable real and paper architecture case studies that have played a key role in this transition. Chiefly the Thamesmead Estate portrayed in, among others, Stanley Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange, followed by the fictional architecture of Bladerunner and its sequel by Ridley Scott and Denis Villeneuve respectively. Through this process Brutalism, once conceived as a progressive social tool, egalitarian, inspiring, and synonymous with forward-thinking and modern urban housing, took on the stereotypical role of an aesthetic of a dystopian future, one synonymous with overbearing oppressive regimes and failing society. Remaining, in the perception of the public, as futuristic but no longer seen as optimistic.