Urban dilemmas: Prussian Rationalism, French folies de grandeur, Catalonian civility, Norwegian urbanity

Architectural Review, The, March, 2005

A couple of decades before Prince Charles started to build his hameau at Poundbury (p51), a quite different approach to urban planning was being explored in Berlin. West Berlin was still run down and isolated, while the eastern half of the city (the capital of the communist German Democratic Republic, the DDR) was in some ways comparatively flourishing. The federal government in Bonn was determined to make its half of the city (an island in the middle of the DDR) into a showcase for Western values, to sweep away the remains of war damage and give the outlying enclave a vigorous economic and cultural life. Much of the fabric had to be rebuilt or renewed, and the federal authorities poured billions into the task. West Berlin became a forcing house for new ideas about urban architecture and planning.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Since the beginning of the century, Germany had fostered a tradition of organizing exhibitions in which the buildings were permanent and intended to act as types for further developments (Mies's 1927 Stuttgart Weissenhofsiedlung was one of the most famous). In Berlin, the Internationales Bau Ausstellung (IBA) was set up to perform the same function in the 1980s. Lavishly funded by the federal government concerned and under the immediate control of the Berlin Senate, the IBA was divided into two parts: Neubau (new building) under J. P. Kleihues and Altbau (old building) under H.-W. Hamer.

In fact, the two were not solely concerned with either old or new buildings but rather worked in different parts of the city. Hamer's group was largely concerned with the poorer areas, places like Kreuzberg and Luisenstadt with their large immigrant populations. Altbau put emphasis on participation and renovation of the huge Miethaus complexes, very dense housing deeply planned round semipublic courtyards to accommodate the peasants from the south and east who flooded to Berlin in the industrial revolution that followed the unification of Germany in 1871.

Much fine and socially important work was done by the Altbau group, but it was Neubau that attracted most of the headlines. In his own work, Kleihues was much influenced by the Italian variety of Rationalism (the Tendenza), forcibly promoted by Aldo Rossi in books like L'Architettura delle Citta (1962) and Architettura Razionale (1982). The aim of urban Rationalism was to reknit the civic fabric that had so obviously been exploded by the precepts of the Charte d'Athenes (and in Berlin's case by war). Traditional types and spaces: tenement blocks, streets and squares were to be reinterpreted in austere, unornamented buildings which, some thought, would acquire gentler qualities under the influences of use and time.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Kleihues and his group were mainly concerned with the much destroyed dense fabric of Baroque Berlin, southern Friedrichstadt, though they had responsibility for more outlying areas such as Tegel as well. The group set up numerous competitions for schemes intended to knit the city together; most of them were for social housing, but there were other elements as well, particularly schools. Most of the people asked to enter the competitions were Rationalists, though there were exceptions--in relatively suburban Tegel for instance, American PoMo was promoted and large blocks by people like Stanley Tigerman and Moore, Ruble, Yudell emerged; they are some of the most modest and urbane products of the usually flashy genre.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

But in Friedrichstadt, Rationalism drove. Its austerity was not inappropriate. Berlin is a tough, hard city, for so much of its pre-1945 fabric was created under the auspices of Prussian militarism and ruthless industrialization. Rob Krier, Giorgio Grassi and Aldo Rossi himself were some of the most well-known IBA competition winners. (1) Rossi's corner housing block in Rauchstrasse (AR April 1987) was derived from patterns to be found in the harsh industrial building of the late nineteenth century; some critics were ravished by Rossi's decision to use British racing green to paint the metal elements of his glazed walls. No one asked the inhabitants what they thought.

This austerity and apparent lack of humanity was one of the drawbacks of the IBA programme, and so was the fact that, because of the funding system, the city was to be re-awakened almost entirely with social housing. Bureaucratic Modernist financial structures ensured that much of the spirit of the Charte d'Athenes lived on in IBA's work, however much the architects and planners resented the fact. Colin Rowe criticized the IBA programme as 'several suburbs in search of a city', (2) which it was bound to be, for the division between Eastern and Western zones of the city had given the prosperous residential areas to the Federal Republic, while the DDR held the city centre and most of the industrial parts. Even so, the IBA was an immensely important event in urban thinking. The AR made two special issues on its achievements (September 1984 for projects, and April 1987 for some of the completed work), but as we published the second one, it was becoming clear that IBA's achievements were not directly replicable in other cities, partly because of its strange geographical and political status--and because Rationalism was not enough. In any case, the whole world in which IBA had been conceived was about to change utterly when the Wall came down in 1989 (an event almost totally inconceivable even in 1987). After the two halves of the city were reunited, architectural attention naturally moved to the city centre and the desert strip that had been established on both sides of the Wall.