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By Karen Breslau
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One recent afternoon in Berlin, a devoutly trendy audience of intellectuals, mostly dressed in black, sat in a dark room, smoking cigarettes and pondering the future gestalt of the reanointed German capital. They listened intently as David Mackay, a British-born architect from Barcelona, ticked off the architectural sins of the extinct East Berlin regime. When Mackay showed a slide of the Palace of the Republic, a horrendous postwar hulk of orange glass built on the Marx-Engels Platz, where the baroque Stadtschloss of the Prussian royal family once stood, they clucked disapprovingly. When he declared that the Foreign Ministry, a concrete eyesore shaped like a sideways sardine can and plunked next door to the classical German State Opera, was built "off the city's axis, " they gasped in indignation. Nothing is more sacred to architects than a logical system of axes, and the entire communist government quarter, Mackay concluded, "looks as though the tide had gone out and left the buildings stranded like beached whales. But instead of a beach, there's a parking lot."
Every other Friday in the city's Stadtforum (city forum), architects, urban planners and ordinary citizens debate, talk, argue, wrangle-sometimes for six hours-the question of what the new Berlin should look like. Can the city that once inspired the baroque elegance of Andreas Schluter, the classicism of Karl Friedrich Schinkel and the daring modernism of Walter Gropius recapture its reputation as a place for important new architecture?
Two years after the wall came down, Berlin is engaged in a massive struggle to transform itself into a bona fide capital not only of united Germany but also of a reemerging Mitteleuropa. As businesses race to establish a presence there and tens of thousands of government workers start to move from Bonn, Berlin faces an unparalleled building boom. Over the next decade the city will need more than 43 million square feet of new office space and at least half a million new apartments. The population is expected to explode from 3.4 million to at least 5 million by 2005. Already a 10.8 million-square-foot government complex is planned on the bank of the Spree River near the old Reichstag. On top of all that, Berlin is a serious contender for the Summer Olympics in 2000. "Berlin is like no other city in the world today," says Ulrich Pfeiffer, an urban-planning consultant. "A metropolis has never been transformed to this extent over such a short period of time."
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Today, Berlin is a wounded city with a sear across its middle. Allied bombing, hasty reconstruction, the wall and the decades of uncoordinated development between East and West have left few traces of Berlin's rich architectural legacy. Along Unter den Linden, Berlin's once grand promenade, Schinkel's magnificent 19thcentury Altes Museum scowls at the massive orange Palace of the Republic. In the West, the sooty, bomb-scarred steeple of the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church, completed in 1895, sticks up out of the neon jumble of the Kurfurstendamm, a glitzy ribbon of cinemas, restaurants and shops slapped together during the cold-war days as the "show window of the free world."
But West Berlin developers also placed a premium on green space and low buildings. In the 1980s the city government sponsored an enlightened program for housing designed by international architects like Charles Moore, Rem Koolhaas and Arata Isozaki. Meanwhile, in East Berlin, socialist realism was planting concrete everywhere. Cavernous rows of Stalinist-style apartment houses line the 12-lane Moscow-style boulevards. Now city authorities want to minimize Berlin's communist legacy, but so far, that mostly means tearing down statues of Lenin and other socialist monuments.
Faced with the huge problem of knitting the two halves of the city together in the midst of a building boom, Berlin officials have consulted urban designers like Barcelona's Mackay and are holding a series of design competitions. So far the biggest battle has been for the heart of the city, Potsdamer Platz. A half century ago it was the buzzing commercial center of the German capital. Today it is a gigantic vacant lot. For more than a generation Potsdamer Platz was a no man's land with the wall slicing through it. Last spring the city sold the property to a group of private investors, including Daimler-Benz and Sony, which are planning to build more than $1.8 billion worth of housing, office and retail space. Then the city irked the investors by holding an international competition to develop a plan for the site. The winners, Munich architects Heinz Hilmer and Christoph Settler, came up with a series of eight-story buildings, radiating from the center of Potsdamer Platz and arranged along a canal. Neighboring Leipziger Platz was to be framed by an octagon.
Critics attacked the winning design as "banal," "visionless" and "bombastic." Some even compared it to the colossal monotony of Albert Speer's unbuilt plans for a Nazi "world capital Germania" in the '30s. Daimler and the other investors commissioned a rival plan from British architect Richard Rogers (who designed, with Renzo Piano, Paris's Centre Pompidou). Rogers's design called for big glass office-and-shopping arcades, arranged like spokes from the hub of Potsdamer Platz. Traditionalists were appalled by the high-rises that he included, but the investors threatened to pull out of the project if his concepts weren't incorporated. Hilmer and Sattler have now modified their plan to allow a few buildings up to 20 stories. Next month the investors will hold another competition to design the individual buildings.
The vast potential of Berlin has been a magnet for American developers and architects, too. "British and American investors who have nothing to do at home because of the recession are heading for Berlin," says Rainer Emmenlauer, project manager for the city's competitions. "No other city in the world is developing on this scale right now." Houston developer Gerald D. Hines is building a hotel and office complex in east Berlin, designed by one of Germany's leading architects, Josef Paul Kleihues. (Kleihues has also won a major competition to design the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, his first project in America.) Cologne architect Mathias Ungers, who is a former dean of architecture at Cornell University, is designing an apartment/office/retail complex for New York developers Tishman Speyer. The architectural firm of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill is designing a 1 million-squarefoot mixed-use building in east Berlin for an unnamed client.
Not surprisingly, commercial real-estate prices have exploded as a result of the post-wall stampede, rising 500 percent in the past year alone. A square meter of prime property now costs 30,000 Deutsch marks, or about $1,740 per square foot. Construction costs have shot up by 20 to 50 percent. Local construction companies are already booked years in advance; new companies have been slow to move to Berlin because there's no housing available for workers. A number of big projects in the eastern part of the city have already been scuttled because the title to property is in dispute. And it can take up to two years to get a building permit; soon it may take even longer as the money-strapped city is forced to slash its budget and lay off staff. The Berlin city government has already projected a budget deficit of 24 billion marks ($15 billion) for 1992, due to the loss of federal subsidies from Bonn and the massive infrastructure expenditures required in eastern Berlin. "This is no place to make a quick investment," cautions Emmenlauer.
The city's money troubles have stalled several public projects. A new museum designed by Aldo Rossi has been postponed; two notable public cultural projects still going ahead are the Jewish wing of the Berlin Museum, designed by Daniel Libeskind, and an addition to the American Library, designed by New York architect Karen Van Lengen. The city may be broke, but officials have an adventurous approach to design: Libeskind's daring plan for the museum, which will document Berlin's Jewish community and its destruction during the Holocaust, has been nicknamed the "Blitz." Sitting next to the classical pastel-yellow Berlin Museum, the building will be shaped like a lightning bolt and sheathed in zinc. "This site mirrors the craziness of Berlin," says Libeskind. "It's unsettling, it's not picturesque, but it's interesting and dynamic." Van Lengen's unusual design for the library calls for a cantilevered, shiplike structure that seems to float above a concrete base.
With this appetite for unconventional architecture, the city is hanging on to its eclectic spirit. "Berlin has every possibility of being the Paris of the 21st century," says architect Rolers. "But you can't turn back the clock. I'd hate to see it as a Disney World, a romantic pastiche." Don't rule out a little romantic reconstruction, though. Traditionalists want to restore the lost elegance of the district off Unter den Linden by knocking down the ugly "beached whales" of the communist government and rebuilding the spectacular royal Prussian castle. "The other great cities in Europe would be unthinkable without their castles," says architecture critic Wolf Jobst Siedler. In Berlin these days, almost anything could pop up-even a 21st-century castle.
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