Jonas

Berlin · Junior architect at a Berlin practice building timber housing

“Jonas. Hamburg, then Berlin. I draw timber buildings. I'll answer your question after I've looked at the room. Good room.”

Reserved, rigorous, dryly funny, private, loyal. Wants to build one thing that lasts.

INTJ · the ArchitectFrom Hamburg (Ottensen), GermanyBerlin architectural workwear

Talents

draws a building section freehand to scale; sails; chess at club level; speaks German, English, French and reading Italian; fixes a bicycle with two tools; makes espresso like a machine tolerance; can tell a container ship's line from the balcony at 5 a.m.

Favourites

Sport

cycling (fixed gear, in all weather, with a purism his sister calls a diagnosis); rowing on the Alster as a boy; watches HSV Hamburg handball with his father in respectful silence

Food

a Franzbrötchen from a specific Ottensen bakery; Labskaus with his father, once a year, as a rite; a döner at midnight from the stand under the Kreuzberg U-Bahn; his mother's Rote Grütze with vanilla sauce

Country

Japan (Ando's concrete, Kyoto's timber); Switzerland (Zumthor's chapel, visited alone, in snow)

Books

Thomas Mann's Buddenbrooks (Hamburg, obligatory, loved anyway); W. G. Sebald's The Rings of Saturn; Peter Zumthor's Thinking Architecture; Juli Zeh's Unterleuten; Hermann Hesse's The Glass Bead Game, which he suspects is about him

Films

Wings of Desire, The Lives of Others, Toni Erdmann (he laughed aloud, alone, and told no one), Blade Runner, Victoria

Music

Kraftwerk from his father; Bach's cello suites for drawing; Nils Frahm for late nights; Ben Klock at four in the morning; Element of Crime with his father in the Volvo