P2 (panel building)

P2 is the abbreviation for a type of residential panel building found in former East Germany. The P stands for parallel and refers to load-bearing walls arranged parallel to wall surfaces. 2 denotes the arrangement of two stairways in a building.

The first building of this type was built in 1961 as an experimental building in Berlin-Lichtenberg. The original building was located at Erich-Kuttner-Straße 9-15 in the Fennpfuhl district and is now a listed building.

A P2 building is characterized by the arrangement of apartments around a nearly square interior stairwell, often equipped with a glass roof. The buildings have five to eleven stories and there are usually two apartments per floor, although some designs have three apartments per floor, above and below the stairwell access.

As a standard design, the P2 is five or six stories high, with the lowest floor raised half a story above the ground. This allows natural light and ventilation to the basement, and minimizes the excavation required for the foundation. The building interior can be accessed by way of an outdoor stairway or via a half-staircase in the entrance area.

The staircase and access area reduce the amount of space available for a ground floor apartment. Therefore the ground floor arrangement consists of a four-room apartment and a one-bedroom apartment - unlike the symmetric three-bedroom apartments on the upper floors. The remaining space is configured as a hallway.

In P2-buildings with more than six stories, every third floor has a distribution hallway. The hallway is usually located on the entrance side of a building and serves as the access or entrance to stairwells, elevators, waste discharge and storerooms. The apartments located above or below the distribution hallways are not accessed directly from the elevator, but via a staircase. Typically the distribution hallways are arranged like this:

As a standard, apartments in P2-buildings have one-to-four rooms. In buildings with special elements, such as a trapezoidal shape, there are also 5-room apartments with two rooms that have no right angles.

Originally there were no loggias on the raised ground floor. Ground floor loggias were added later in the course of reconstruction work.

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