Potsdamer Platz.

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).

The controversy which inevitably broke out over the conservatism of the masterplan was heightened by debates overland ownership. Before unification, Daimler Benz already had an option on a site near Potsdamer Platz. Almost as soon as the wall came down, the firm (and several others like Sony) was allowed to buy large tracts of public land at what many thought to be very cheap rates. The nature of development proposed by Hilmer and Sattler seemed tame to the new landholders, and they commissioned their own masterplan from Richard Rogers. In many ways, it was an improvement on what critical reconstruction could produce. Potsdamer Platz was to become a grand tree-lined crescent with a central tower; new avenues were to radiate westwards from the Platz, which was to be unified and made urbane, over a century and a half since Schinkel had first proposed the idea. The Rogers proposal was smartly turned down by the Senate, and the Hilmer and Sattler masterplan remains in force.

But it has been reinterpreted. Daimler Benz and Sony both held further competitions for their sites. Renzo Piano (with Christoph Kohlbecker) won the one for the Daimler Benz area and Helmut Jahn the one for the Sony plot. In a slightly different system, Giorgio Grassi was made planner of the Asea Brown Boveri site, a strip that runs along the east side of the Potsdamer Platz development. While the latter sticks pretty closely to Hilmer and Settler, both Piano and John have made significant variations: most obviously, much taller tapering towers on the Platz and some revisions of the street pattern.

Hilmer and Sattler's plan did not specify functions, merely determined block layout and volume (this is a grave problem of critical reconstruction). The developers are committed to making a chunk of city with uses based on those of the Platz in the '20s; it combines offices, shops, hotels, restaurants, cafes, flats and (very conspicuously) entertainment. To a great extent, the ideal of compactness and complexity is in the process of realization.

In the beginning, there were doubting voices, Vittorio Magnago Lampugnani, then director of the German Architecture Museum in Frankfurt, remarked in 1994 that 'the demand on the planners is to construct animated urbanity while the project's overall guidelines are firmly based on profitability ie the exact opposite'.(6) Such a dichotomy between urban life and profit would never have occured to the owners of Potsdamer Platz in its glory days, and it does not seem to affect the behaviour of Berliners, now that the first parts of the development are at last open to the public. I was there on a Friday and Saturday in early winter and the streets were packed, the cinemas overwhelmed, the casino whirring, the shops full, and it was almost impossible to find a place to sit down for lunch. The contrast between Piano's warm, urbane thoroughfares and the windy, cheerless emptiness of nearby Friedrichstrasse could not have been greater.

Of course, many people must have gone to the new Potsdamer Platz to see the sights, but it is hard to imagine that popularity will decline greatly as the place becomes more integrated and accepted. After all, this on the whole is welcoming architecture, unlike the PoMp/Rationalist buildings which dominate so much of the rest of new Berlin - though doubtless the proponents of such architecture will decry Piano's work as excessively sweet and gemutlich.

Serious problems

In fact, the development does have serious problems. Socially, for instance, the housing will be available only to the fairly prosperous. Physically, the way in which the land has been sold has meant that it is impossible to achieve the dense lively texture of the old Potsdamer Platz, generated by numerous contiguous individual holdings and uses. To try to increase variety, the Daimler Benz (debis)(7) site has been divided up and plots have been given to different architects, Piano and Kohlbecker have most, and have set a fine example, using new cladding techniques to humanize the scale of even their largest building, the debis headquarters.(8) Richard Rogers' three blocks (which are approaching completion) promise well, and Lauber & Wohr's buildings have an agreeable and genial unpretentiousness. But Moneo's blocks are unnecessarily stolid. Hans Kollhoff's tower (which will partner Piano's against the Platz itself) is intended to be as boringly Berlin Rationalist as possible, and deprived of the possibility of making his over 20-storey building in loadbearing brick (think of the width of the walls at the bottom), Kollhoff is erecting panels of prefabricated brickwork with dumb rectangles punched in the middle of each. Isozaki's(9) block is downright dreadful: unwelcoming, dauntingly heavy in scale, its dreary aggressiveness is relieved by ridiculous would-be lighter moments, like wiggly glass walls and facile patterns on the facades.

The building, more than anywhere else in the complex, justifies Heinrich Wefing's fear that 'all around New Potsdamer Platz, I would think, there will be no nutters nor tarts. Graffiti, if any, will only be seen as exhibition pieces inside the galleries'.(10) In other words, the public realm will be privatized and controlled by big corporations, and deviant non-consumers will not be allowed in the streets. The few bits of the Isozaki building which are open to the public are heavily controlled, but no one wants to go into them anyway. Elsewhere, Wefing seems to be wrong. At the moment, there are beggars and nutters among the crowds (though no more than elsewhere); modern informality of dress and behaviour perhaps conceals the drabs and dips who were so obvious in the '20s; I personally welcome the lack of graffiti. So far, the place seems to work, and have a chance of becoming a real piece of city. P.D.

1 The other two squares were Pariser Platz to the north and Belle Alliance Platz (now Mehring Platz) to the south; they were renamed at the 1814 Berlin peace celebration for the Allies first victory over Napoleon. The Tiergarten (animal garden) was royal hunting land outside the customs walls; now it is the fine public park in the middle of the city.

2 A concise history of the place is given by Wefing, Heinrich in 'Berlin City Limits' in Gentz, Manfred, Der Neue Potsdamer Platz; Ein Kunststuck Stadt, be.bra.verlag, 1998

3 Ibid, p149 'Houses' is a poetic translation of 'Hauser', which, in this context would normally be interpreted as 'buildings': there were certainly no houses left round the Platz then.

4 Richie, Alexandra, Faust's Metropolis: A History of Berlin, HarperCollins, London, 1998, p719.

5 In Gentz, op cit, p165.

6 Quoted by Wefing, Ibid, p167.

7 debis is the acronym for Daimler-Denz InterServices, a relatively new company within the group, which offers financial and management advice. It ran the site and acted as general contractor as a sort of advertisement for its own services.

8 Isozaki worked with Steffen Lehmann & Partner Arkitekten, Berlin.

9 Wefing, idem.

As in traditional cities, the spaces of the debis site vary greatly. Each architect has made a particular contribution, with Isozaki and Lehmann's work offering a taste of Gotham City in drag, Moneo being discreetly Rationalist and Piano offering his new delicate filigreed urban architecture as a continuo against which all other parts are seen. His Marlene Dietrich Platz (pp31, 33 and here) in the middle of the site is intended to be the focus of past and present. It is a pedestrian space which has been described as every German's idealized vision of Italy, urbane but without the washing lines. It is most unlike the grandiose flatulence of Hohenzollern, Nazi or Rationalist PoMo Berlin (pp28-30). Our photographs do not do it full justice (we do not blame the photographer who had to cope with many difficult problems in getting these pictures so early). But pictures 3 and 4 give an impression of a space that seems over-blown compared to the reality of a welcoming and kindly place.

A balance between public and private space is Plano's aim. Hence the enclosed shopping gallery and the Marlene Dietrich Platz. The arcade is a new kind of space for Berlin, though it has a distinguished modern tradition in Hamburg, AR June 1981 (the developers of some of the glazed Hamburg arcades are the proprietors of this one). It may look a bit like a conventional mall (though detailing and space handling is of a completely different order to most American ones). But it is in the middle of the great city: this is no suburban diversion. Here, vast crowds mill about as they did in the 1920s. Our pictures were taken just after the building opened and before it was discovered by Berliners as a sheltered place for shopping right in the middle of the city. Perhaps it will give the slowly re-awakening cyanosed corpse of a city a heartbeat and lifeblood.

Piano has invented a generous civic architecture of terracotta and glass. It can be, by turns, place-making, kindly and formal. But on the huge debis site, there are passages of dullness (look at the flank of his debis headquarters building right in 10). Such unostentatious moments are perhaps inevitable in any piece of city generated by modern monopoly capitalism, which can command huge tracts of land and devote them to single uses. But in general, his buildings are generous and responsive to the few clues the razed site offered.

Architect

Renzo Piano Building Workshop/C. Kohlbecker

Design team

B. Plattner, associate in charge R. Baumgarten, A. Chaaya, P. Charles, G. Ducci, M. Kramer, N. Mecattaf, J. Moolhuijzen, J. B. Mothes, M. Busk Petersen, J. Ruoff, M. van der Staay, E. Volz, E. Audoye, G. Borden, C. Brammen, D. Drouin, B. Eistert, M. Hartmann, O. Hempel, M. Howard, W. Matthews, G. M. Maurizio, D. Miccolis, M. Pimmel, S. Stacher, M. Veltcheva, J. Krolicki (stage); P. Furnemont and C. Colson (models) Kohlbecker collaborators: J. Barnbrook, H. Falk, A. Hocher, R. Jatzke, M. Kohlbecker, M. Lindner, N. Nocke, A. Schmid, W. Spreng

Technical consultants

Ingenieurgemeinschaft IGH/Ove Arup & Partners, Schmidt Reuter Partner; Ingenieurgemeinschaft Boll & Partners, Ingenieurgemeinschaft IBF (Dr Falkner), Weiske & Partner (statics); Muller BBM (physics); Hundt & Partner (extraction); IBB Burrer, Ove Arup & Partners (electrical engineering); Mohrle & Kruger (landscaping)

Facades

Gotz Ltd

Photographs

1, 2, 3, 4, 8, 9, 11, 12 Werner Huthmacher 6 and p35 Reinhard Gorner

5, 7, 10, 13, 14 V. Mosch

Key criteria for generating the new Potsdamer Platz (particularly the debis site) have been minimizing energy use and pollution. The buildings are planned to make most use of daylight (by having shallow floor plates) and to reduce heating and cooling- for instance the debis headquarters has double skins to contain a layer of tempered air so that when office windows are opened, air at extreme temperatures will not be drawn in (AR January 1998). Individually controllable mechanical ventilation is available in all offices, but humidifiers and de-humidifiers are banned. Chilled ceilings are provided in areas of unusual heat production. High thermal insulation leads to buildings that are expected to run at 70kWh/[m.sup.2]. All these measures reduce primary energy consumption by 50 per cent compared with normally airconditioned buildings.

Heating for the whole area is from a combined heat and power distribution centre, which most unusually also supplies cooling in summer. Rainwater is used to irrigate landscaping, and for Lavatories; the scheme is intended to save 20 000[m.sup.3] of water a year. Construction materials were chosen to minimize pollution: for instance bio-degradable plant oil was required on all shuttering.

Building so much so fast in the city centre could have seriously disrupted urban life. As far as possible, earth and rubbish have been removed by water (the Landwehr canal) or rail (the old goods-yards of the Potsdamer and Anhalter stations were converted to be vast materials handling depots, where waste was temporarily dumped and materials could be stored waiting to go on site). Lorries were allowed only in exceptional circumstances; savings in daily road traffic are estimated at 1700 lorries.