The New Berlin: What Happens When a City Transforms Itself Through Architecture?

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Berlin has tantalized the world for the last 12 years. Millions cheered as the Wall was dismantled. The city was going to become the gateway to the entire former Soviet Socialist empire as it was transformed into an economic dynamo by new investment from the West. We watched a skyline of construction cranes rise over the metropolis, and marveled at the awesome commitment to knitting together a city divided for 50 years. Berlin audaciously tried to reconcile its tragic past with a new vision of the urban future.

The city placed the realization of this grand ambition in the hands of architects-an opportunity unequaled since the great rebuilding projects after World War II. Important museums and public buildings were erected or rebuilt. Hundreds of miles of the rapid-transit system have been renovated and hooked back together as work proceeds apace on a vast new rail gateway. Countless less-glamorous projects have been undertaken, from refitting power plants to repaving sidewalks.

Lately, things have quieted down. The government is moving East from Bonn, but the economic integration of the old Communist bloc has been slow. The city is awash in empty commercial space, and apartments are cheap. Indeed, the city spent so freely over the last decade that it is all but bankrupt. Most of the cranes that so thrillingly carved up the sky have now been dismantled. Raphael Roth, a Berlin real-estate developer counsels patience. "It's taking longer than we hoped, but Berlin will be the hub for the East. The East is the future, because the west's closets are full."

Whether or not Roth is correct, a number of critics have found the architect-designed new Berlin wanting-no matter the money spent and the world-class talent invited. Berlin is just "a museum of itself," sniffed Herbert Muschamp, the New York Times critic, in 1999. "The great undertakings of the past decade have been overwhelmingly disappointing," wrote Martin Filler last November in The New York Review of Books. Did architects fail Berlin? "People come to Berlin with expectations they would never apply to any other city," comments Frank Barkow, an American architect who works in Berlin with his German partner Regina Leibinger.

Berliners are vexed by this American disappointment. They have always seen architecture as an expression of the city's identity. Americans use architecture to aggrandize the individual, they say, pointing to the nation's neglected public realm. After the terror attacks of last September, however, Americans are looking at Berlin-and at architecture-in a new light, asking whether designers can express their grief and commemorate their losses.

Perpetrators commemorating victims
Berlin has been there and done that. And Berliners will tell you that experience does not make it any easier. Peter Eisenman's Holocaust Memorial has been held up by years of debate, money problems, and design alterations. Work stopped some time ago on the Topography of Terrors, the ruined site of what had been Gestapo headquarters, where cost estimates for completing Peter Zumthor's design for a museum had risen astronomically. In spite of the local debt crisis, both projects are expected to proceed soon. Debate raged so long over what and how Jewish history should be interpreted in the museum designed for it by Daniel Libeskind, that it opened without displays two years ago-to instant acclaim. It reopened in September with its permanent exhibition installed (RECORD, October 2001, page 46).

Such commemorative efforts form what Michael Blumenthal calls "a conscious effort on the part of this generation of Germans to confront their nation's past and to deal with it in a constructive and open way." The Nazis drove out his family, one of the city's oldest and most prominent, when he was 12. Starting over in America, Blumenthal eventually became treasury secretary under President Carter. He returned to Berlin to oversee the Jewish Museum's installations. "It is unique and courageous for a nation to put up a monument to the victims of its own atrocities." he adds.

Numerous experts told him Libeskind's design was inappropriate for exhibitions. While some critics haven't changed their minds, Blumenthal says, he's become a convert to the power of architecture. "We had 350,000 paying visitor a year when it was empty, and with the exhibitions, it is now the most visited museum in Germany," he says. "It's surpassed my expectations."

Where's the great new city?
Even the sternest critics usually point to the Jewish Museum, Norman Foster's Reichstag, Frank Gehry's DG Bank, Sauerbruch + Hutton's GSW headquarters (respectively RECORD, January 1999, page 76; July 1999, page 102; October 2001, page 120; June 2000, page 156) and a few other structures as high points in the new city's architecture-a list any city might envy.

At the same time, there is also a broad consensus that architecture has failed Berlin in a way that extends beyond the quality of individual projects. Berlin architect Axel Schultes has also been an outspoken critic, even though it is his ambitious, competition-winning master plan that is being built to house the national government. "Berlin could have launched an international discourse about the city."

When you look for specifics, however, the compelling paradigm of the city for the next century remains undefined, inchoate-certainly not ready to be tested at the scale of a major world capital. The enticingly panoramic clean-sweep urban schemes that so preoccupied the architects of the 20th century-Chandigarh, Brasilia, Dhaka, even Cold War Berlin itself (when each half of the city saw urban regeneration as a vindication of political ideology)-don't comfortably fit today's pluralistic view of the "good city."

(Continued)

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