Building Berlin - construction projects in Berlin, Germany

Architectural Review, The, Jan, 1999 by Peter Davey

For all its problems, Berlin is the world's most potent crucible of thought about the nature of cities. With vast expenditure of wealth, the richest nation in Europe has generated projects designed to knit the fractured metropolis together and restore its status as the greatest city between London and Moscow. They have much to teach.

If you were going to find a model for cities in the new millennium, you would not start with Berlin. Its history is too troubled, dominated by authoritarian regimes, streaked with violence and sometimes horror. And, physically, it is too boring and gross to make a satisfactory general model.

Up to 1871, Berlin was a small provincial city on the river Spree, set amid the flat sandy wastes of Brandenburg on rather grandiose wide streets designed to suit the pretentions of the Hohenzollerns and their armies. After the German Empire was inaugurated, its capital rapidly became a booming industrial city surrounding a centre increasingly dominated by pompous Wilhelmine monuments and populated by four million intolerably rude inhabitants, most of them in uniform.(1) In the 1930s, though Hitler and Speer failed to build their unbelievably grandiose Arch of Triumph and Volkshalle,(2) other Nazi architects made lasting grim Neo-Classical marks on the city, for instance Heinrich Wolf's Reichsbank, which is now being converted into the Foreign Ministry; the Air Ministry which Sagebeil built for Goering is in the process of becoming the Ministry of Finance.(3) After the DDR retreated behind its Wall in 1961, the architects of the capital of the rump eastern state invented a succession of dreary styles based on prefabricated concrete with which they patched the windy grey streets of the Hohenzollern's seventeenth- and eighteenth-century centre.

In the west, flashy commercial architecture dominated the Kurfurstendamm area,(4) while the Internationales Bauausstellung (IBA) under Josef Paul Kleihues attempted to pull together the decayed Baroque structure of southern Friedrichstadt and Tiergarten with infills of social housing: it was a noble if fundamentally implausible attempt to recreate city life, but at least it preserved the urban pattern and allowed the two halves of the city to be reunited when the wall came down. (Unlike the work of Scharoun, whose wonderful buildings up against the Wall, like the Prussian State Library, were deliberately designed to subvert the underlying Baroque plan which was held to speak of authoritarianism and past unhappiness.) By the mid '80s the city seemed stuck: romantic because of its strange geographical and political position, but heavy, somnolent, certainly no sleeping beauty.

All that changed on the night of 9 November 1989. The Wall came down, the DDR collapsed shortly afterwards, and a great debate broke out about where the capital of the unified country should be. There was much opposition to the proposal to move the seat of government from Bonn to Berlin. Those against the move cited ghosts and memories of evil, location (too far east),(5) ostentation (too grand) and, of course, the huge cost. Supporters of Berlin pointed out that its history had extremely noble moments, for instance Prussia was the first state to allow religious toleration, and the city had a vibrant cultural life in the Enlightenment and in the 1920s. The politicians decided: President von Weizsacker and Chancellor Kohl persuaded the Bundestag that the choice of Berlin was essential to give the inhabitants of the former DDR a sense of belonging to the new state. The government would move in the year 2000. The decision was made in 1991, and now its awesome effects can be seen.

The awesome vision

If you stand on the platform of the S-Bahn at the Lehrter Bahnhof and look south, the sky is filled with tower cranes to the horizon. In the immediate neighbourhood, there are the cranes being used to vastly extend the station so that it becomes Berlin's central interchange at the crossing of the key continental rail routes: north-south from the Arctic to the Balkans and east-west from Vladivostock to London (p47).(6) A little further to the south is the Chancellery, rising on the bend of the Spree (p50). Beyond is the grove of cranes of the new parliamentary offices surrounding Foster's great glass dome over the reinvigorated Reichstag.(7) A little to the east is Pariser Platz (p65) behind the Brandenburg Gate, where the US, British and French embassies are emerging on their prewar sites. Then beyond, to the cranes of the commercial developments in Friedrichstrasse, mostly rather dim PoMoish/Rationalist affairs, now largely finished. South again, almost as far as you can see, to the steel forest round Potsdamer Platz (p33). From north to south, almost all the sites are on the sterile central swath which was created in 1945 and kept desert by the Wall.

Critical reconstruction

The principle behind most of this extraordinary quantity of building has been 'critical reconstruction', a concept advanced by the architectural historian Dieter Hoffmann-Axthelm and taken up with great vigour by Hans Stimmann, the powerful city architect of the early '90s who was backed by Wolfgang Nagel, the