Now, 10 years after the wall came down, you can once again drive through the Brandenburg Gate. And Berlin is still buzzing with disjointed energy–no longer because it’s the weirdly bifurcated locus of international tension but because it’s a city in the throes of a world-class identity crisis. Nowhere is this more obvious than in the building boom that’s been consuming the center of Berlin. As the Parliament prepares to move from Bonn to the new capital next week, the city remains the biggest construction site in Europe, with dozens of cranes peppering the skyline, and a vast network of pipes in gaudy pink, orange and lavender running above ground to pump out water as bulldozers plow into the marshy soil. The huge number of projects have offered an unparalleled opportunity for German architects as well as the international design stars who’ve flocked there, including the Italian Renzo Piano; Frank Gehry, Helmut Jahn and I. M. Pei from the United States, and Britain’s Richard Rogers and Sir Norman Foster, who’s just been awarded the 1999 Pritzker Prize, architecture’s Oscar.
It’s a unique moment for Berlin to redefine itself and confront its ravaged history. Unlike London and Paris, Berlin was a late bloomer, with roots not as a Roman outpost but as a small medieval settlement on the banks of the River Spree. It had few delusions of grandeur until the 17th century, when King Friedrich greatly expanded the Royal Palace (destroyed by the Soviets in 1951) and created the famous Unter den Linden, the road to his royal hunting grounds. The Hohenzollern kings expanded the city in the 18th and 19th centuries, laying out grand squares, avenues and monumental buildings. With the consolidation of the German state in the late 1800s came the overblown Wilhelmine style. By the ’20s, when Berlin emerged as an avant-garde force–and became a world-class city–it spawned great early modern buildings by such architects as Erich Mendelsohn.
Hitler, of course, hated everything modern; his architect, Albert Speer, developed a grandiose scheme to transform the capital into a new city called Germania, with bombastic neoclassical buildings, including a Great Hall, with a dome bigger than St. Peter’s. The plan was never built (though several Third Reich buildings survive, including Goering’s Air Ministry, which is being turned into government offices). The bombing of World War II turned a vast part of Berlin into rubble. Then came the Allied partition of the city; the old royal and civic center became part of East Berlin.
This tortured history ought to spark a new architecture rich with meaning. But Berliners have very mixed feelings about the past. “Berlin has a double tendency,” says Renzo Piano, who did the master plan for the new Potsdamer Platz. “One is to forget, since everything was destroyed by war. But at the same time, they have this desire for memory, for nostalgia.” Passionate debates have raged in smoke-filled chambers over the last decade about what to build where and what it should look like. The modernists duked it out with the postmodernists: since the Nazis hated the Bauhaus, they reasoned, modern design should rule. The historicists countered that Berlin is a city of history, where neoclassical stone buildings belong.
If there’s one new project that successfully knits the past to the future, it’s Sir Norman Foster’s design for renovating the 1898 neo-Renaissance Reichstag. Burned by the Nazis in 1933, the building was a hulking ruin when taken by Soviet soldiers in 1945. Lying just west of the wall, it was renovated in the ’60s. But it didn’t capture the world’s attention until the artists Christo and Jean-Claude wrapped it in shimmering silver in the summer of 1995. The event sparked spontaneous festivity. “The mood of the period in which it was wrapped was just unbelievable,” recalls Foster, who was set to start the minute the wraps came off. “It was an extraordinary experience, a signal for the transformation, the rebirth, of the Reichstag.”
The architect’s scheme doesn’t freeze-frame the Reichstag in time but respects its layered history. When the interior walls from the 1960s rehab came off, original stone carving, shrapnel scars and Soviet graffiti were revealed–which have been left exposed. But most dramatic is Foster’s glass and steel dome, a beacon that is sure to become Berlin’s new icon. Inside the dome, a spiral ramp lets visitors look out at the city and down into the new parliamentary chamber below. “There was incredible debate over the design,” says Foster. “This was highly controversial. Symbolically, the public would be above Parliament. The memories in the building would not be wiped away. It’s a radical conception.” Also radical are the ecological elements, including a cone of mirrors in the dome that reflects light into the chamber below, as well as sucking up hot air (there should be such a gizmo in every debating chamber).
While the federal government is pouring millions of marks into the Reichstag and a vast complex nearby that will house the new chancellery and other offices, the city fathers aren’t nearly so flush. Already Berlin has dug deep into its pockets for streets, bridges and relinking the subways and trains between west and east. To develop key areas, Berlin has lured private investors–but the city is controlling what they build with a strict set of rules, aimed at bringing an old European urbanity back to the center. The code is very much the work of Hans Stimman, 57, chief city planner in the early ’90s. Stimman describes himself as a ’60s leftist architect who worshiped modernism but came to realize his error. “Nobody wanted to live in the modern housing blocks on the periphery. We all wanted to live in old villas in West Berlin.” His reverence for history comes with a distance from the past. “My parents’ generation couldn’t look back. That was Nazism. They could only look forward. It’s a specific German sickness.” Stimman’s controversial historicist plan puts limits on building heights, narrows streets and mandates a mix of office, commercial and residential space.
In the new Potsdamer Platz, you can see the code at work. Once the busiest commercial crossroads in prewar Berlin, it lay fallow and overgrown in the death strip along the wall. All that was left was a former wine shop and, remarkably, the trees that had lined Potsdamer street. The parcel was sold to Daimler-Benz and Sony (the curving glass Sony complex, designed by Helmut Jahn of Chicago, isn’t finished). The city planners imposed a classic street grid–though it’s not connected to any other streets yet. At one end, Piano’s designed a plaza–Marlene-Dietrich-Platz–in front of a new, glass-fronted theater; the place also includes a hotel, offices, apartments and a shopping mall. The buildings of Piano’s own design are the best in the development: his headquarters for Debis, a division of Daimler-Benz, is an elegantly modernist high rise, and his materials throughout–buttery terra cotta and glass–bring a sunny Mediterranean lightness to a northern climate. But under the restrictions, the buildings by some of the other world-class architects in the project–Richard Rogers, Rafael Moneo, Arata Izosaki–tend to look clunky and dour.
The Potsdamer Platz doesn’t quite feel like a real place yet. Few of the expensive flats have sold (and vacancy rates for new offices are high throughout the city center). So there aren’t many people living there, though Berliners and tourists are flocking on the weekends. But make no mistake–this is not old European urbanity, it’s a ’90s entertainment destination: pick out some new sneakers in the mall, grab a burger at McDonald’s and head for the next show at the Imax. Piano himself puts his finger on one problem when he remarks, “It is almost an impossible job to design a city because what makes a city beautiful is that it’s not designed. Time makes cities beautiful.”
Nowhere is his maxim more apt that in the freshly rebuilt Pariser Platz next to the Brandenburg Gate, once the ritziest square in town. Now it is a lifeless pastiche of new stone facades, bearing no more relation to old Berlin than Cool Whip does to schlag. Only California architect Frank Gehry figured out how to tweak the system: his building for the DG Bank not only has a nicely animated facade of stone and glass, but it’s a Gehry building turned inside-out: the interior atrium will feature a huge sculptural shape the architect describes as “a horse’s head,” containing a conference space.
One new building in Berlin stands out as a true original, yet it also subtly honors history. Daniel Libeskind’s Jewish Museum is a large, impenetrable zinc-covered zigzag of a structure, pierced by slits of windows, slashing impolitely through the cityscape. A yellow baroque building next door is the only way into the museum–you enter its lovely foyer and then descend steep stairs into a disorienting world of skewed corridors, canted floors and angled galleries. One space is the Holocaust tower, or what Libeskind calls a void: beyond a heavy door is a narrow chamber 27 meters high, gray and cold, with a slit of light at the top. Standing inside is a powerful, chilling experience.
The museum is not dedicated to the Holocaust but to the whole history of Jews in Germany. Libeskind, 52, a Polish-born American whose own family fled Poland, believes the power of his building underlines the fact that “the relationship of Germans and Jews was not just intellectual or esthetic but emotional and psychological.” One way he used history to generate his abstract forms was to plot the addresses of key Jewish citizens on an old map of Berlin and connect the dots. But how this remarkable building will function when it’s full of display cases of objects is an open question–the first exhibition isn’t until October 2000. Still, it is attracting tours now; when it first opened for a free evening of viewing last January, thousands of Berliners came.
Berlin is still wrestling with a long-planned federal Holocaust memorial on a site south of the Brandenburg Gate. A design by New York architect Peter Eiseman calls for a vast field of more than 2,000 stone pillars. Another proposal, backed by Germany’s new Culture minister, Michael Naumann, would adapt Eiseman’s plan to include “a house of memory”–a library and archives. Like many others, Naumann believes that “a sheer monument will suffer the fate of all monuments in modern history–they become invisible. To ask art to represent the great crime of man’s history is to ask too much.” Both proposals will go before Parliament in May.
While Berlin is consciously trying to confront the history of the Holocaust at these places and others, evidence of more recent history is rapidly disappearing. Most signs of the wall are gone from the center city. Terrible as the wall was, the divided city engendered a vibrant, diverse lifestyle. “Berlin is no longer gemutlich,” remarks a Berlin architectual engineer in his 40s. “We had a lot of places right against the wall for poor people, artists. A culture is gone.”
As Berlin is becoming a capital of the new Europe, the messy vitality of West Berlin is being lost, that crazy disjunction that Billy Wilder captured in “One, Two, Three”–a city where cultures and traditions clashed, where bankers and artists and gays and politicians all lived, and so did the ghosts of the past. Could the city of Kurt Weill and George Grosz become too bourgeois, even corporate? Despite some promise, the story of the new Berlin is more about real estate than design. Let’s hope the city can build instead on its rich and haunted culture.
