The Mäusebunker was designed by Gerd Hänska, a German architect whose work can be stylistically described as brutalism. In the sixties and seventies, he created the Walt Disney Elementary School in Gropiusstadt and the Kindertagsstätte of the Karl-Bonhoeffer-Nervenklinik in Wittenau. But his most famous work is the infamous Central Animal Laboratory of the Freie Universität.

The Mäusebunker construction took over a decade of development due to opposition from the people in the neighborhood and animal rights activists. There was, also, an issue with funding. The initial cost estimation from the project was around 4 million Deutschmarks, but it ended up costing close to 126 million by the end of construction.

All of this to have an animal laboratory that could host up to 45,000 mice, 20,000 rats, 5,000 rats and a smaller number of frogs, sheets, chickens, and pigs. Today, there are way fewer animals there, and the focus is only on mice, with an emphasis on transgenic models for disease research.

When you visit this place, you almost feel like you shouldn’t be there. The way that the Mäusebunker was designed brings up a threatened or intimidated presence. Walking around it made me wonder why this structure looks like it needs to be defended. Something like a spaceship out of a sci-fi movie.

And we can only imagine how the building must have looked like to the people in the seventies in Berlin. Before the concrete discolored and the brown marks started to show, maybe this building was attractive to the people around it. But we cannot be sure about it.