Berlin.

As the first buildings of Berlin's Potsdamer Platz development emerge out of Europe's largest building site, the city begins to present a challenging model of urbanism for the twenty-first century which has emerged from reinterpretation of the past.

For over 100 years, Berlin has been a melting pot of European urban thinking. Since it became the capital of the German Empire under Kaiser Wilhelm I in 1871 and the explosion of the city started under the impetus of frantic industrialisation, it has always been in one way or another a place in which mighty forces (sometimes tempered by creative imagination) forged new forms of urban life and transformed them into spaces and symbols. In the late nineteenth century, the Miethausen were evolved in Kreuzberg, where Saxon peasants were transformed into industrial proletarians in tiny flats packed round narrow courtyards; a mile or two away were the pompous triumphalist monuments of the new empire and the flashy temples of booming capitalism.

After the First World War, the grinding heaviness of Wilhelmine society and architecture was rejected, and optimistic collaborations between private and public interests created exemplary workers' housing estates like Britz and Siemensstadt. We all know what happened next. In fact, the Nazis did not have enough time to make many built contributions to the city; their legacy was a degree of destruction unprecedented since the Visigoths sacked Rome.

Then came the blockade, which did much to Cut the city in half. Both east and west struggled to create decency out of destruction; large new housing estates were developed on the outskirts. The old central areas were largely ignored, but war-time destruction was often compounded by eliminating many relics of a past which so often had unhappy memories. Planning and architecture were not very different in the two halves: the west had the 1957 Interbau, 'the city of tomorrow',(1) a Modernist collection of one-off buildings by well known international architects; in the east, the stolid blocks of Stalinallee 'the first socialist street on German soil',(2) were equally indifferent to context and history.

In 1961, the Wall slashed across stumbling regeneration. The traditionally prosperous west was cut off from the formal city centre and the eastern working class areas; it was as if an impassable line had been drawn north-south through the Place de la Concorde in Paris, or down Park Lane in London. While paying lip-service to the ideal of reunion, both sides had to make a sense of urbanity out of what they had got. In the east, the task was bizarre enough, with the great monuments of the old centre hard up against the border, but at least there was free traffic between the city and the rest of the country, and Berlin remained the capital of the Democratic Republic.

Critical reconstruction 

The western half of the city was in a much more difficult predicament. It was a quite small island in the middle of a hostile state and had to rely for existence on huge subsidies from the government in Bonn. Yet the place was never as claustrophobic as many who never went there imagined (for instance there was the Grunewald and the big lakes) but it had to be totally self contained physically, so that the Kurfurstendamm, the equivalent of Kensington High Street, became the heart of the city. Here, it was culture that was marginalised, with Scharoun's Philharmonie and Prussian State Library isolated in the east between Wall and Tiergarten.

Partly because of its isolation and need to regenerate the notion of city out of what had on the whole been nineteenth-century inner suburbs(3) the western section of the city felt the need to reinvent itself physically. In 1977, Wolf Jobst Siedler and Josef Paul Kleihues launched a campaign to make the demonstration building area intended as successor to Interbau into a much wider exercise which would reinvigorate large parts of the city, principally in areas next to the Wall, still desolate as a result of bombing and post-war planners' dislike of history and their fondness for object buildings. The Internationale Bauausstellung (IBA) was set up and Kleihues was put in charge of the Neubau section which worked largely in the much destroyed late Baroque areas of Southern Tiergarten and Southern Friedrichstadt; Hardt-Waltherr Hamer led the Altbau department that worked in the slums of Luisenstadt and Kreuzberg, which although more intact than the Baroque parts, were much decayed and suffering from social depravation. Neubau was guided by Kleihues's belief in 'critical reconstruction', and Altbau by Hamer's slogan 'careful urban renewal'. The aim of both was to build bridges between the past and Modernism (which had been so destructive in the previous three decades).

On the whole, IBA worked very well: indeed, the AR hailed its achievements as heroic.(4) The city districts in which it worked were to a great degree knitted together, and a model was set for the rest of the world which showed how traditional urban values could be reinterpreted for a modern society without recourse to pastiche (neither PoMo nor Prince of Walesism). But there were difficult problems, because political and economic constraints prevented many uses and building types being included in the programme. As Colin Rowe remarked 'No city can be made of Sozialwohnungsbauen [social housing] alone. The great city requires something in excess of that. It requires far more than the measuring mind of twentieth-century government and bureaucracy is willing to contribute'.(5)

When the AR's second special issue on IBA was published in 1987, the prospect of the city being re-united was as distant as ever. So when the Wall came down only a couple of years later, no-one had any ideas for re-uniting the city. With admirable rapidity, plans for infrastructure were generated (initially reconnecting links cut by the Wall but later becoming much more ambitious). But it took a good deal longer to evolve schemes for generating city tissue in the swath of dereliction that accompanied the wall.

Reinterpreting the European ideal

From the first, it was clear that the Potsdamer Platz area was of key importance and, after a number of vicissitudes, an overall masterplan by Hilmer & Sattler was evolved (p36) which followed Kleihues's principle of critical reconstruction (ie the old plan was broadly followed, and buildings created as blocks defining the street rather than as isolated objects). The plan attracted a good deal of criticism. Rem Koolhaas decried it as 'petty bourgeois and provincial'(6) and many others attacked what seemed to be its timid obsession with the past. Even more controversial was the method of development: the two principal sites were sold to big international corporations, Mercedes Benz and Sony, a move which caused a furore both about letting such organisations get so much power over large key chunks of the inner city and letting them have the land for what seemed to be very low prices.(7)

But perhaps there was no real alternative. Public sector development is largely dormant or discredited at the moment, and it may be that the private sector is the only means of finding the capital and management skills to generate such huge developments in a sensible period of time. And perhaps, with its reductive tendencies kept in check by a generously humane plan like Piano's for the Mercedes Benz site (p34), private capital can provide the functional variety and liveliness which, as Rowe pointed out, IBA so conspicuously lacked. But doubts remain. Almost all the big public spaces in the Piano scheme (for instance the atria) are privately owned, and there has been much criticism of privatisation of the public realm. And will there be enough demand to fill all the buildings and provide the proposed rich mix of functions?

Only experience will tell. But few will question the bravery of Piano's plan and his first building on site (and of the venture as a whole). Berlin's history has made it almost the antithesis of the sprawling, centreless Anglo-Saxon model which has been so successful in the New Worlds, and is now so often being imported to Europe. United Berlin may show ways of generating a city with a heart that really works, creating for our time a reinterpretation of the ancient European urban ideal.

1 AR April 1987, p23.

2 Ibid, p38.

3 Of course within this matrix there were older parts with civic sense like Charlottenburg, and traditional working class areas like Wedding and Kreuzberg.

4 AR April 1987, p28.

5 Rowe, Colin 'IBA: Rowe reflects', AR September 1984, p93.

6 Cruickshank, Dan 'Cross Roads Berlin', AR January 1993, p21. It is difficult to see how any plan for the area could have been anything other than bourgeois: the aristocracy no longer exercises power and 'socialist planning' was discredited by Stalinallee.

7 In November 1992, the EC ruled that Sony had bought too cheap and should pay more. Cruickshank, ibid.