A black box bursts apart from within and teeters on the edge of collapse. That is the first impression you get of the new building for the Berlin-based publishers Axel Springer, designed by the Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA). It is an edifice that triggers associations with the Kaaba of Mecca or with Malevich's Black Square. The basic geometry of the black, rectangular form may be seen as a symbol of mystery, and the way it splits open must surely stand for the resolution of that enigma. Or perhaps it expresses the end of an office building that encloses and shelters some secret within.

Stretched like a tender skin, the transparent atrium partly reveals itself behind the fractured walls of the outer box. But even more dramatically, the gaping opening where the atrium nestles into the tinted curtain walls suggests that a metamorphosis is under way: soon the building will shed its dark outer skin and become totally transparent. This transformation from closed to open has also been of interest to the OMA architects Rem Koolhaas and Chris van Duijn. Unlike people entering a typical office block, visitors no longer disappear into the building but remain visible to the public. A route is even envisaged inside, with the intention that it will be accessible to everyone. That is vital for the functioning of a democratic institution like a media corporation. The distrust of journalism has risen to problematic proportions in recent decades. That is why it matters that members of the public should not feel excluded from the production of news. Conversely, journalists must endeavour to mix with society as a whole, rather than shutting themselves off in their bubble; the desired transparency must go both ways.

Nowadays many people work largely on the flat surface of a computer screen. The clear advantages of digital methods are speed, precision and fluid communication. But architects, no less than journalists, experience in their daily activities fewer opportunities for creativity, for the collectivity that moves you to abandon your screen and your comfort zone. Making a newspaper used to be a collective effort, not without its own romanticism, which entailed much smoking and drinking, and with constant working day and night once the deadline loomed. In this new office building, the stunning atrium may be seen as an attempt to breathe new life into this collectivity. It must seduce the employees to engage in conversation and to challenge one another to abandon familiar paths and to venture into new ones. Due to the computerized process of the media corporation, that too is a continual necessity. The relation between what is printed and what is displayed with an electronic medium shifts more and more into the latter category: the investigation of new possibilities is now commonplace.

The founder of the publishing corporation, Axel Springer, was a passionate champion of reuniting the two Germanies. He positioned the golden yellow of his office tower in the 1960s as a gleaming beacon close to the Berlin Wall. One day, he knew, the Wall would be knocked down. The East Germans until then would have to make do with a symbol of hope and freedom.

That idealism was grasped and realized in the design by OMA. Where the Wall once stood, now over 30 years ago, the location is now occupied by the atrium of the new building. OMA has thus transformed what once divided two communities into the exact opposite: an empty space that unites the two halves, and where anything could happen – or nothing at all if the people who work there spurn the gesture.

The bifurcation, as a significant historical feature, is not blurred but on the contrary is made manifest. Accents have been applied in the design to distinguish the two halves. Apart from the possibility of interpreting them as echoes of the schizophrenic past, they are meant to help you find your way around the building.