Building Berlin.

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

Berlin senator with responsibility for the environment.(8) The power of the Bezirken (boroughs) which had so hampered the work of Kleihues and the IBA was greatly curtailed in the central area to allow the great plans to proceed with maximum speed. But the IBA belief in recreating the traditional street pattern, and particularly the city block, was fundamental to critical' reconstruction, which was in some ways a response to Modernist schemes like the Interbau at the Hansaviertel, or the Markisches Viertel, where isolated buildings which completely ignored all aspects of tradition replaced tenements traditional to European cities.(9)

Yet, though the reinvention of the city block has given coherence to new parts of the city, it is not an unqualified success. The succession of commercial object-buildings along Friedrichstrasse is as clumsy as any to be found in the world. They may all nearly the same height, as Stimmann wanted, but common eaves heights do not make an urbane city, as is shown in comparisons between today's self-advertising lumps and the lively human-scaled texture of the street seen in turn-of-the-century photographs. Rigid orthodoxy of block doctrine promises to produce even more stolid results in the Linkstrasse which will run down the linear park in the Potsdamer Platz redevelopment in a row of symmetrical buildings with windows punched in masonry walls. Axel Schultes makes another criticism: the traditional Berlin block was he points out 'permeable' - there was a vigorous inner life in the courts within the perimeter, where functions often differed from those on the perimeter.(10) The new blocks' are mostly unifunctional and have no semi-public internal spaces. For instance, apart from the arcade in Plano's part of the Potsdamer Platz, the only other modern one in Berlin is a flashy affair in Henry Cobb's block on Friedrichstrasse.

There are many other problems. For instance, the developments proposed for Alexanderplatz (the big urban space on which the city focused in the inter-war years and under the DDR). They promise to be as coarse and reductive as the new blocks in Friedrichstrasse, but with high dominating towers (critical reconstruction is not as powerful a concept as it was a decade ago). And there are social problems: the city is actually losing population as the prosperous young leave tenements for cheaper houses and gardens in Brandenburg. Berlin could become polarized between the rich in the new blocks in the centre and the poor trapped in decaying sump estates on the city perimeter. None of the developments shown in this issue will help to ameliorate this social Parisification.

So Berlin is far from a universal model. But it does offer lessons. That is why the AR devotes another issue to it, one which focuses on the centre, with some more peripheral projects to indicate the staggering wealth of new architecture throughout the city. P.D.

1 See Richie, Alexandra, Faust's Metropolis: A History of Berlin, HarperCollins, 1998, pp203-205. The uniforms (of which there were civilian forms as well as military ones) have now gone, but the rudeness has not. Richie's book is an excellent survey of the city's story.

2 Though they did of course manage to finish the Chancellery (destroyed in 1945), which was 150 times the size of Bismarck's residence, ibid p471.

3 Both buildings were in the east and have had chequered histories. During the Holocaust, the basement of the bank was used for sorting Jewish valuables (including gold teeth).

4 The Wall approximately divided the city between what had been the affluent west and the much poorer east, with which went most of the formal Hohenzollern city centre. The centre of the western side, the Kurfurstendamm, can be likened very roughly to Kensington High Street or Boulevard Montparnasse. The AR covered the IBA in two issues: September 1984 and April 1987.

5 It is only 40 miles from the post- 1945 Polish border.

6 And it will have an U-Bahn station, making it a major interchange on the city's metro system.

7 The Reichstag, a pompous Willhelmine monument sensitively and dramatically transformed for a modern democracy by Foster and Partners will open in late spring. We hope to show it then.

8 A contemporary account of the urban thinking is given in Crossroads Berlin, AR January 1993.

9 It has been argued that Modernist redevelopment destroyed as much of the historic fabric of Berlin as the War itself (as it did of course in other European cities). Development in the east was very similar to the west, with the exception of the grand Stalinallee the Soviet style 'first socialist street on German soil' (AR April 1987 p38).

10 In conversation with the author, November 1998.