Potsdamer Platz - design and construction of town square in Berlin, Germany

Architectural Review, The, Jan, 1999 by Peter Davey

Potsdamer Platz is the great symbol of the unification of Berlin. In the '20s, the only time when the city was free (until recently) of authoritarian government, it was the focus of a wild and pulsating urban life that became the wonder of Europe. Can the celebrated vibrancy be recaptured in a world of planning and monopoly capitalism?

Potsdamer Platz has become a symbol for the urban regeneration of Berlin. This is something of an irony, for the Platz was a vital part of the life of the city only for a few decades. Before that, it was a rather fatty place at the start of the road to Potsdam outside the elegant octagonal Leipziger Platz (one of the three Baroque squares which opened onto the Tiergarten and the western suburbs from eighteenth-century Berlin).(1) In the early nineteenth century, the court commissioned Schinkel to make a proper square out of piecemeal developments which had grown up beyond the Potsdamer Tor (the customs wall gate). He made grandiose plans, but royal money ran out and all he was able to build was a couple of Doric gatehouses between Leipziger Platz and what became known as Potsdamer Platz. The railway arrived in 1838, the terminus of the first line in Prussia, between Potsdam and Berlin. Potsdamer Platz had begun to take on one of its key roles, as a massive traffic interchange. It was to get busier and busier for over a century.

By the '80s, the garden spaces between the buildings surrounding the Platz had been filled in; there was a new big railway terminus; Siemens electric light and trams arrived.(2) After the First World War and the defeat of inflation, Potsdamer Platz was the symbol of the city in the roaring '20s. Regiments of whores, sharps and pickpockets strutted and oiled round the square and the surrounding streets, which were themselves lined with hotels, entertainment palaces, bars and restaurants. Contemporaries were ecstatic about the vitality of the place, above all the intensity and speed of its traffic: Erich Kastner's 1929 poem typifies the excitement:

'Trams rattle. Cars fly by, screaming ... The great big city seems to moan, As if it's being spanked. The houses sparkle, tube trains groan'.(3)

Berlin-New York

In the jazz-age, Berlin had at last grown out of provinciality and the Hohenzollerns. It was the great throbbing modern metropolis, the Grossstadt of George Grosz and Otto Dix. Unplanned Potsdamer Platz was its metaphorical centre, where, almost by definition, the powers of modern capitalism could be seen to have overthrown the constraints of imperial authority. In the middle of the place, a traffic light was needed; it was claimed to be the first in Europe, copied direct from America. Here was the Times square of Berlin-New York at its most modern, wild, greedy, youthful, exciting and intense.

Fifteen years later Potsdamer Platz was in ruins. Although its ethos had little to do with that of the Nazis, it was physically next to many of the key buildings of the regime: the Speer and Hitler Chancellery and many of the main ministries; it was also the site of an SS bunker. It had to be destroyed because the only way of ensuring the final end of the Nazi state was to lay waste the centre of Berlin with British bombers and Soviet artillery. But the ruins lingered, patched up and partly in use until the East German uprising following the death of Stalin in 1953, when Mendelsohn's battered Columbus-Haus (the only distinguished building remaining) burnt down in the violence. Potsdamer Platz staggered on as the busiest crossing point between east and west (the division between the Russian and the British sectors went through its centre, exactly following the line of the old city wall and Potsdamer Tor). When the Wall went up, the crossing was the first place to be sealed.(4) Remaining ruins and buildings in both Leipziger Platz and Potsdamer Platz were razed, leaving only traces of their plans and, very strangely, the Weinhaus Huth and the Esplanade Hotel in the death zone.

In the first months of reunification, it became clear that Potsdamer Platz was key to reconnecting Berlin. It stands at the point where the great southward thrust of development from the Lehrter Bahnhof through the government quarter meets the east-west commercial belt along Leipziger Strasse into southern Tiergarten. And not only that: the myth was still very potent of Potsdamer's centrality to the city in the '20s, the only time when the entire city has ever been free of authoritarian rule; its vitality and modernity were remembered, not its chaos and seediness.

An invited competition was held for the masterplan of the whole southern Tiergarten area under the aegis of a special commission of the Senate of Berlin. It was won by Hilmer & Sattler in 1991, with a proposal which suggested a new set of streets with defined, ordered blocks mostly of one height, with the odd stumpy tower defining the perimeter of the old Potsdamer Platz. As Heinrich Wefing has commented, the winning scheme tried 'hardest to embrace the idea of the "compact and and complex space of the European city" - as opposed to "the American concept of skyscrapers"'.(5) It was all very much in the spirit of 'critical reconstruction' (p30).