This past weekend I attended a free public lecture by an eminent architecture professor at the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, which is holding an interesting series of Berlin-inspired talks, performances and exhibitions. I have to say I thought the lecture itself, not to mention the poor quality illustative photographs, was pretty lacklustre, but the issues raised about the dubious value of reconstructing destroyed buildings in reunified Germany, typified by the meticuluous reconstruction of cathedrals in Dresden and Berlin and highlighted by the plan to reconstruct a long-destroyed palace on the site of the former socialist parliament house, are very interesting, so I wanted to document some of my own uneducated thoughts on the matter.
First, some context. There are two very good articles that summarise the crux of these issues. This 2009 article by Nate Berg deals with the bizarre plan to reconstruct a destroyed former royal palace in the centre of Berlin on the site of the recently dismantled former parliament building of the socialist German Democratic Republik (the former parliament building is the first picture above, the model of the reconstructed schloss is the second picture). There seems to be no clear purpose that the reconstructed palace would serve other than symbolically erasing the recent past. This 2006 article by Andreas Tzortzis outlines the building controls that effectively stifled innovation in architecture during Berlin's important post-reunification development. I think these two articles, read together, summarise my main concerns about Berlin's recent development and its futile attempt to erase its own recent past, especially the socialist past, and to recapture some bygone ideal of urban form by slavishly mimicing and recreating buildings from earlier periods - at the expense of its future.
The story for me starts after the war and before reunification in the divided city (a period canvassed only in the abstract at the lecture I attended). I know everyone's interested in the public buildings but I like to start with the housing. West and East Berlin developed the generally colourless housing styles necessitated by the urgent demand for acommodation in the ruined metropolis, and this is evident in the ugly identikit high rises on the eastern side and the less ugly but still rather bland identikit neubau medium density style which I happen to think is rather successful as an urban planning device when they are generally low rise and clustered around frequent, active squares, as they tend to be in Berlin.
It was in the public realm, however, rather than the mass produced housing that we saw the spatial manifestations of the opposing political ideologies of East and West (just as we saw spatial expression of the Nazi political ideology in architecture such as the Olympic stadium). East Berlin's conscious construction of a modern, socialist metropolis was an homage to Moscow in every respect, especially the stark, imposing expanses of the flattened Alexanderplatz, formerly a vibrant commercial and entertainment district (and, like Potsdamer Platz, a constant changeling; it was undergoing substantial reconstruction to assume the latest of its many forms when I was there in 2006), dominated by the striking Fernsehturm which for so long provided many East Germans with their only glimpes into West Berlin, and monumental Stalinalle (now Karl Marx Allee), looking as though it has been transported directly from Moscow with its huge apartment "palaces". Nothing, however, expressed the aspirations of the German Democratic Republic more than the Palast der Republik. Built on the prominent central, riverbank site of the destroyed former royal palace, the Stadtschloss, which had been damaged during the war and then demolished by the East Germans in 1950 (remember, the area known as Museum Island where the schloss stood was, and still is, full of large, neo-classicial buildings at varying states of disrepair). This sleek, gold-sheathed building that housed not only the parlimentary chambers but also the best restaurants, bars and discotheques of the socialist state, not to mention its only bowling alley, was a true palace of the people, designed to invoke pride.
The political undertones of urban design in West Berlin were no less overt, with the conscious reconstruction of Kurfürstendamm and Tauentzienstraße as temples of consumption and capitalism, anchored by the once ultra-modern and distinctly American-styled Europa-Center and the resilient high-end department store KaDaWe ("Department Store of the West").
Reunification. A new city with two of everything. The hated wall and the dead zones on either side of it where so many attempted defectors had died was torn down and not missed, although two small sections were retained, one which today is part of an interesting and important if somewhat harrowing museum on the wall's history and the other which is sort of an outdoor art gallery. Curiously, and somewhat distastefully in my opinion, the famous "checkpoint charlie" border crossing which was removed with the border later returned, as a replica, as some sort of amusement for tourists. This foreshadows Berlin's strange relationship with its own recent urban past
It seems to me that in Berlin's first blush of reconstruction activity after reunification, the emphasis was determinedly on establishing some sort of capitalist "catch up", with the harbinger being the perhaps hurried reconstruction of Potsdamer Platz, once a busy transport interchange and vibrant hub of retail, hotels, cafes and nighlife, and reconstructed today again as transport hub but perhaps in a more sterilised, less chaotic, less exciting crush than it once was. My feelings about Potsdamer Platz remain ambivalent; tourists certainly like it, but to me it's disjointed from the rest of Berlin's urban character (admittedly, many would argue that Berlin's urban character is disjointed!). When I first saw the "new" Potsdamer Platz in 2002 it left me utterly cold: a collection of gleaming commercial temples, dominated by three high rise towers, only one of which (the Sony Center tower, now the DB tower) displays any beauty, and the worst of which is a pure pastiche of mid-20th century American urban architecture; impressive yet inward looking "campus-style", poorly connected sites, and an overall sense of space that was inconsisent with the "platz focussed" urban sensibility of the rest of Berlin - indeed, the entire project seemed to turn its back on the actual platz itself. When I saw it again in 2006 I felt that it seemed to work better but it still seems like an anomoly to me - the huge indoor shopping mall, the inconspicous nature of the housing, the overbearing sense that this is first and foremost a commercial space remain problematic for me.
The "reconstruction" of the commercial buildings around the Pariser Platz (the third photo attached to this post), on the former East Berlin side of the city adjacent to the Brandenburger Tor, is also problematic. Here, commercial interests, mostly banking and insurance but also some foreign embassies I think, reclaimed dormant property rights and constructed facsimiles of pre-war office buildings. It was as if everything that had happened during and after the war had never happened, and it certainly seemed as if building styles, techiques and materials had not changed. This "mimicry" style of building also characterises the reconstructed Leipziger Platz, Friedrichstraße and Mitte.
To me, Pariser Platz is a failure because it feels like a theme park: Disneyland's Main Street USA probably has more authenticity (I say probably as I have never been to Disneyland). The beauty of the Brandenburger Tor and the potential for a significant public space in this important position between the Tiergarten and the elegant boulevard of Unter den Linden was lost by the denial of time and an obsessive compulsion to "recreate" the "right" era. It will now never be anything more than a facsimile, an artefact of some German desire to recreate an idealised urban past and thus deny the possibility of a new or different present or future.
Slavish reproduction of architecture from bygone eras does not preserve heritage, it denigrates it. Pariser Platz is not a triumph of planning and restoration, it is a temple to mediocrtity, lack of imagination and lack of faith.
I think Pariser Platz summarises both sides of the problem in the reconstruction of Berlin: on the one hand, there is the dominance of private property interests in the shaping of the built environment and the public realm (Sony and Daimler-Chrysler that bought land on the cheap in Potsdamder Platz, and the banks and embassies that reclaimed land in Pariser Platz); on the other hand, you have this strange retreat into a very bland, safe style of urban planning which forces all new buildings to mimic the styles of older buildings. Oh, of course there are exceptions, with many examples of great contemporary architecture: I recommend Michael Imhof's book Berlin New Architecture for a good round-up of some of the better examples. Overall, though, much of what has been built recently is intolerably ordinary.
The tragedy of all this is that just around the corner from Pariser Platz, on the other side of the Brandenburg Gate, we see how things might have been. The Reichstag building with its much celebrated new glass dome remains an exciting and above all relevant building, respectful of and referncing its past but not mimicing or seeking to recreate it. Surrounded by the gleaming new buildings of the Parliamentary Quarter including the imposing Chancellory, the Reichstag beautifully projects a confident, optimistic and forward-looking image for a newly unified, powerful and proud nation, an image that respects the past but is not mired in it. These buildings show us what might have been of the new Berlin.
Sadly, the confidence and the power of this statement dissipated, probably commesurate with Germany's declining economy I suppose, and what we have seen since then in the reconstruction of Berlin is not only an attempt to eradicate and deny the built environment legacies of the modern era, especially those relating to the failed socialist state, but also a retreat from the exciting, contemporary architecture associated with capitalist cities and a subsequent emerging dominance of "safe", boring, pastiche architecture, patherically aping far superior earlier styles.
The reconstructed Reichstag offered a promise for a new Berlin that was not realised. Instead, much of the "new" Berlin is a pale imitation of an older Berlin. This is a pity indeed. I may not like what Potsdamer Platz became, or what Alexanderplatz is becoming, but at least they are changing, developing, growing with the city and the times. They are not being denied life, nor a future, because they are not condemned to become replica theme parks.
