Artist and designer Caris Reid is loose in Berlin, making paintings, exploring the city and breaking hearts. We’ve asked her to sniff out some of Berlin’s most talented characters: artists, fashion designers, and anyone else who strikes her fancy. For this week’s installment, Caris pays visit to the studio of artist Luis Berrios Negron, a Puerto Rican expat who bills his work as a hybrid of “technology, geopolitics and art.” That’s MIT-genius-speak for room-sized models of carbon atoms, site-specific work in Afghanistan and other wildly-ambitious sculptural installations.

Luis Berrios Negron’s studio sits in the heart of Mitte, sandwiched between the historic Kunsthaus Tacheles and the former site of the Berlin wall. The maze of rooms, shared with Estonian painter Eric Adamsons, is unbelievably compartmentalized, yet somehow brilliantly coherent — just like Negron himself. Inside, we relaxed into a conversation about art, politics, the moral responsibility of artists and their physical constraints (namely, being broke).

The space is a labyrinth of chambers and passageways, quite unlike any studio I’ve seen in New York — unlike any space I’ve seen ever, really. We wove from room to room through Narnia-like cabinets and four-foot doorways, past drum sets and taxidermy animals, until I felt as though there was no exit. Each room was bathed in a warm summer light, with windows thrown open to the breeze.

Negron’s focus lately has been on complex installations called “nonspheres” — a play on Vladimir Vernadsky’s term Noösphere, which is his theory of humankind’s creation of resources through the metamorphosis of elements in nature.

From the back corner room that Luis uses as his primarily workspace, I had a clear view of the Kunsthaus Tacheles — a large, 1900s-era brick building first seized by Nazis and later overrun by the squatters and artists who made it famous. The building was once the epitome of creative freedom, but with age has softened into a well-known tourist attraction complete with outdoor sand bars, a cinema and postcard stand.

Kunsthaus Tacheles — a beacon of commercialism and accessibility — seemed to undermine everything Negron and I had spoken of moments before. The view was staggeringly beautiful, and the air was perfect, but I was filled with an overwhelming desire to close the windows and drawn the curtains (if there had been any curtains), and revel in the blissful bubble that Negron had created a little bit longer.