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

Architectural Review, The, Jan, 1999 by Anne Vyne

In attempting to make a formal front for the Dresdner Bank on Pariser Platz, Berlin's poshest piazza, Volkwin Marg may have embraced neo-Classicism a little too fervently. But the interior is an unexpected, ingenious pleasure.

Pariser Platz is the square immediately behind the Brandenburg Gate as you approach the centre of Berlin from the Tiergarten. The NeoClassical Gate(1) was the main one in the western side of the customs(2) wall that surrounded the city in the eighteenth century, and the Platz is at the west end of Unter den Linden, the ceremonial axis of the city, down which the victorious troops of all regimes from the Hohenzollerns to the DDR have marched in triumph.

Before the War, the square was the grandest in Berlin, walled by the American and French embassies,(3) the best hotel (the Adlon), the Akademie der Kunste, and several very posh blocks of flats and offices. After the War and the Wall,(4) the square was laid waste and became part of the death zone. When the city was reunited, everyone was in favour of Pariser Platz being made into a fine urban space again. The embassies would move back; the hotel and arts academy would be reinstated, and prestigious firms would be encouraged to build round the square. But there was a good deal of disagreement about what the new buildings should look like. Under the rules of critical reconstruction (p30), eaves heights had to be 22 metres, and buildings had to have a proper termination against the sky. Stone cladding was to be used as far as possible. Interpretations of these constraints have varied enormously. The Adlon is in undiluted repro (p25); J.P. Kleihues has made Rationalist buildings that echo pre-War predecessors on each side of the propylaeum, but without quite descending into kitsch; Moore Ruble Yudell have made the huge US embassy now finishing in the south-west corner of the piazza in muted PoMo; Gunther Behnisch (with Manfred Sabatke and Werner Durth) proposed a new arts academy between the embassy and the Adlon on the south side of the square, but progress has been slow because of objections to its free, abstracted glass facade.

Opposite the Behnisch site is one of the few buildings to be fully completed so far, the Berlin headquarters of the Dresdner Bank by gmp, von Gerkan Marg & Partner, which takes up the middle of the north side of the square. Falling somewhere in the middle of the spectrum of styles, its creamy limestone elevation is sober and nearly symmetrical, with paired vertical windows arranged roughly in Classical proportions round a central double-height entrance. Adjustable bronze shades provide a degree of variation in the elevation on sunny days, and bronze trim somberly relieves the plain stone wall slabs. The roof, like that of the Adlon, is in the planners' preferred patinated copper.

Once through the bronze-framed doors, a completely unexpected space is revealed. A circular atrium rises through the whole height of the building to a shallowly domed rooflight. On most of the upper floors, the small offices so beloved by German business look over the void, through (the now virtually mandatory) openable windows. The site necessitated some such arrangement, for it is surrounded by party (fire) walls (except of course at the front, where little offices look out over the piazza). If inner offices were to have daylight, it had to be brought in from the top. What could have been a grim well is transformed by cleft touches: the clark grey steel inner structure is honed to the smallest sections and has finely detailed joints. Colours are carefully chosen to enliven individual rooms and (by borrowing) the central space. Most important of all is the way in which the treads of the spiral staircase and the floors of the inner window-cleaning galleries are made of translucent glass. What might have been deadening elements have become luminous, particularly in the latter case, for lamps at the edge of the galleries make them glow in their own right.

As with the outside, elegance and bankerly decorum is provided by very careful control of proportions and good materials. The circular space with all those hard surfaces also engenders a degree of modesty and quietness in behaviour: it is certainly no place to bring a small child, but then this is not the sort of bank you visit to cash a cheque or reduce your overdraft. It is devoted to the quiet pursuit and manipulation of Big Money, and so of course it is a most appropriate inhabitant of the new Pariser Platz. A.V.

1 Completed in the early 1790s by Carl Gotthard Langans. The copper quadriga by Johann Gottfried Schadow was placed on it in 1793: it was stolen in 1806 by Napoleon, and returned in 1814 after his defeat at Leipzig, when the square was renamed Pariser Platz in triumph.

2 The wall was built in the 1730s, partly to enforce the city's customs arrangements (most German cities had separate customs arrangements until the 1833 Zollverein started the unification of Germany). The wall was also said to be intended to prevent soldiers deserting. Because it had defined the boundary between boroughs, the East German Wall was partly built on its line,