Berlin Contemporary

Architecture and Politics After 1990

Julia Walker

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Visual Arts
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781501367526
• eBook ISBN: 9781501367540
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: History of Architecture

For years following reunification, Berlin was the largest construction site in Europe, with striking new architecture proliferating throughout the city in the 1990s and early 2000s. Among the most visible and the most contested of the new projects were those designed for the national government and its related functions. Berlin Contemporary explores these buildings and plans, tracing their antecedents while also situating their iconic forms and influential designers within the spectacular world of global contemporary architecture. Close studies of these sites, including the Reichstag, the Chancellery, and the reconstruction of the Berlin Stadtschloss (now known as the Humboldt Forum), demonstrate the complexity of Berlin's political and architectural "rebuilding"-and reveal the intricate historical negotiations that architecture was summoned to perform.

1

Bridging and Breaking—Master Planning the Spreebogen

At the stroke of midnight on October 3, 1990, the arc in Berlin’s river Spree known as the Spreebogen came alive with sound, color, and light as one million people gathered to celebrate the official reunification of East and West Germany. In front of the Reichstag, flags waved, fireworks burst, and the cheering of the crowd rose above the steady toll of a copy of the Liberty Bell, a Cold War-era gift from the United States to West Germany. The euphoric excitement on display at this long-awaited declaration of national unity was inextricable from the site in which the ceremonies unfolded. Swarms of revelers flowed down Unter den Linden, the city’s historic main thoroughfare, streaming through the Brandenburg Gate and into the Spreebogen to bridge and unify the very area that had been broken during the country’s division, fractured by the Berlin Wall and the death strip surrounding it. The collective exhilaration of this moment could only have resulted from a profound awareness of the site’s various histories, many of them traumatic, as these intense memories of place mingled ambivalently with the optimism of a fresh start.

It is in this context—that is, in the feverish atmosphere of possibility surrounding Germany’s newfound unity—that this chapter considers the master plan for the new administrative heart of Berlin at the Spreebogen (Figure 1.1). During the process of reunification, perhaps no area of the city was the subject of as much heightened global interest as this horseshoe-shaped bend in the river that defined the former course of the Wall and embraced the past and future home of the national government. Occupying a parcel of about 150 acres at the western edge of the historical city center, the Spreebogen lies north of the Tiergarten and slightly northwest of Unter den Linden. For many years preceding reunification, the site had been one of Berlin’s most notorious voids, and it remained a painful urban record of the century’s violent rifts.¹ The architect Axel Schultes, whose firm won the 1992 competition to master plan the new government quarter, claimed that the challenge posed by this wounded terrain was how “to coax the soul out of the Spreebogen, the genius loci.”² Only by so doing, according to Schultes (who had lived most of his life in Berlin), could the site’s new architecture make sense of the city’s spectrum of townscapes and “begin to link the virtues of each place together.”³ In their winning competition entry, Schultes and his partner Charlotte Frank proposed that the new plan for the area take the form of an immense “Band des Bundes,” or band of federal buildings (Figure 1.2), twice spanning the Spree and crossing the former path of the Wall, the scars of which remained deeply etched in the urban fabric. As one reporter for Der Spiegel described it, the Band des Bundes would “unite the tattered halves of the city,” while also asserting a clear-eyed vision of the balance of powers in the new democracy.⁴ This historical zone of rupture and conflict would thus be transformed into a confident embodiment of Germany’s new national self-image.

Figure 1.1 Site of the Spreebogen, early 1990s. Aerial view.

Figure 1.2 Schultes Frank Architekten, proposal for Spreebogen, Berlin, 1992. Schultes Frank Architekten.

To many viewers at the time of the competition, Schultes and Frank’s Band seemed to be a remarkably bold statement of how, at the tail end of the ruinous twentieth century, the idea of national unity might be signified in urban form. On paper, the Band had the paradoxical quality of appearing at once monumental and fragile, stable and transient. Somehow, this master plan seemed clearly to communicate both the new nation’s optimism and its awareness of the constraints on monumentality put in place by the crimes of past regimes. The overarching form of the Band, and its associated visual processes of connecting, suturing, and repairing, appeared capable of embodying the complex way in which the Spreebogen’s particular history made its way into an uncertain present. In the new master plan for the government district, history would return insistently through its architects’ conscious citations.

But the very assuredness of Schultes and Frank’s plan masked the way that the Spreebogen’s history also returns involuntarily, as architectural and urban forms from the past resurface in the Band like debris after a shipwreck. After all, this was a site, and a city, freighted with the historical baggage of some of modernity’s most politically significant urban ideas.⁵ From Germany’s first Gründerzeit to the moment of reunification, Berlin’s urban development rocketed forward on an accelerated cycle of construction and demolition, with dramatic spasms of urbanization followed by the repeated ravages of war and division. Berlin’s tendency toward the erasure of its built environment throughout the twentieth century led the author Peter Schneider to characterize the postreunification landscape in the city center as a “tabula rasa,” a slate whose very blankness seemed to hinder reconstruction.⁶ In truth, Berlin, its post-Wall voids notwithstanding, was anything but a tabula rasa. Rather, the city after 1990 was a palimpsest of realized and unrealized urban plans, a zone replete with ideas competing for currency—especially at the site of the Spreebogen, the primal scene of Germany’s most notorious failures of democracy. Understanding the Spreebogen today requires a careful reading of its layers of accumulated buildings and plans, and an exhumation of its many unrealized modernist futures. More broadly, I argue that the Band des Bundes demonstrates, in intensified form, history’s often uncomfortable recrudescence in the contemporary city.

In its built form, the Band des Bundes has tended to frustrate, in multiple senses of that term: its many modifications since the bold gesture outlined in their competition proposal have frustrated its architects, its curiously unsettled quality has frustrated viewers, and its massive yet oddly tentative appearance has frustrated analysis. Indeed, this sense of frustration has characterized much of the reception of Berlin’s building boom. As the excitement surrounding reunification subsided, and as more and more urban projects reached completion toward the end of the millennium, the architecture and planning of contemporary Berlin came under repeated critical fire. For many close observers, Berlin today represents a wasted chance to realize some of contemporary architecture’s most adventurous ideas. In this chapter—and throughout this book—I seek to step back from the debate surrounding the success or failure of Berlin’s new state architecture. Rather, I aim to see the debate itself, and its attendant aura of sky-high stakes, as historically situated within global contemporary architecture culture. For the questions posed by the debate over the uses and abuses of history in Berlin’s new official architecture are symptomatic of far larger struggles in contemporary architecture regarding how to cope with the relentless invasion of the past into the present.

Ultimately, what is on view in the Band des Bundes, whether its architects and patrons intended it or not, is the way in which the city of today is understood to be continuously infiltrated by historical forms, theories, and procedures. This intrusiveness is specific—and it is also instructive. At least in theory, the utopian aims of modern architecture and urban planning demanded the suppressio...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Berlin, the Contemporary Capital
• 1 Bridging and Breaking—Master Planning the Spreebogen
• 2 The Reichstag’s New Lightness of Being
• 3 Monumental Modernism—The Chancellery as Future Ruin
• 4 Palaces of Doubt
• Conclusion: No One Intends To Open an Airport
• Bibliography
• Index
• Copyright