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

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The uses of history
Several critics have seen the "good guys"-the esthetically innovative avant-garde formalists-as losing the architectural battle for Berlin to the "bad guys"-the contextualist conservatives (RECORD, October 1995, page 29). But Matthias Sauerbruch, partner in the Berlin and London firm of Sauerbruch + Hutton (lionized as a neglected innovator), offers a more nuanced view. "The generation of the '50s and '60s was trying to get as far away from history as possible," he says. "Now it's more about discovering history and trying to make it usable to go forward."

Berlin's urban debate is, as much as anything, a debate about the way history is used, and it is conducted largely within a paradigm framed by the late Aldo Rossi. In his The Architecture of the City, of 1966, he argued against Modernist idealization, and its striving to perfectly fit the form to the use. He demonstrated that ancient buildings adapted to changing uses over the centuries, even becoming richer as they accumulated physical alterations and layers of meaning over time. IBA, the "building exhibition" of the 1980s, was imbued with the Rossi ethos. It plugged holes in West Berlin's urban fabric through historically aware small-scale insertions of new work by a roster of name-brand international architects.

The IBA approach, now dubbed "critical reconstruction," underpinned the hastily assembled citywide strategy for rebuilding. It is at the scale of execution, rather than of philosophy, that the formalists battle the contextualists. The esthetic innovators claim that officials, led by the Berlin Senator in charge of urban development, Hans Stimman, have simply not been critical enough in terms of the reconstruction. Stimman's guidelines tried to restore a scale of architectural expression and a diversity of uses typical of pre-war Berlin through highly prescriptive urban-design guidelines. In rebuilding the Baroque-inspired streets and squares of the once-posh Friedrichstrasse, which largely lay fallow during the divided-city era, guidelines mandated a vertical layering of retail, office, and residential uses and a horizontal diversity of façade treatments. "This change in paradigm," said Stimman in a speech given in New York last year, "away from the American city to the Old Urbanism of Europe, provoked a segment of the planners and builders in Berlin, the architects wedded to the free-standing object." According to Sauerbruch, the Stimman approach subsumed the architecture of the individual to the harmony of the whole. "They claimed," he says, "that architecture that doesn't follow the rules or that aspires to be exceptional only rarely achieves it. But this approach has proved a self-fulfilling prophecy in which individual buildings have come out very average and the whole now exudes mediocrity."

The new nostalgia
Berlin was not only supposed to show the way to a new vision of citymaking, it was supposed to remain unique and special at the same time. Like many long-time visitors to Berlin, Columbia University architectural historian Barry Bergdoll finds the city "at once disappointing and fascinating." What bothers him is that Berlin "seems more and more just another major city." Such normalcy is essential for the city to function as an economic entity that creates wealth for its inhabitants. But Bergdoll recognizes that it's not as much fun to visit: "So much seemed exciting in '92. We enjoyed the frisson of that moment of possibility-seeing the Wall and walking through Checkpoint Charlie." You don't get that "Cold War tourism" charge anymore, he says, "and we're nostalgic for that moment. That's why visitors are so obsessed with where the Wall went." (Its path today is all but undetectable.)

The most glaringly untidied place in Berlin is the asphalt-covered plain at the very center of the city, presided over by the marble and copper-tinted reflective glass bulk of the partially demolished Palast der Republik. In front of it once stood the dour Stadtschloss-the Prussian imperial palace. Severely damaged in World War II, eastern-sector officials demolished the mammoth structure in 1950. For years, a well-organized coterie of citizens has campaigned for the vastly expensive reconstruction of the palace, even though no one quite knows what it would be used for.

The Schloss controversy is one of Berlin's "permanent debates," according to local architect Daniel Libeskind, concerning, inevitably, history and memory. "There is a tradition of restoring palaces and old fabric as tourist destinations," says Mary Pepchinski, an architect and professor at the University of Dresden, naming the Romerburg in Frankfurt, a historic quarter recreated out of the ashes of wartime bombing. A government commission recently recommended rebuilding the palace exterior around a modern interior. "It's seen as safe, boring, and maybe a quick solution-a classic political compromise," says Jan Fischer, an American architect and writer who lives in Berlin. "But no one seems beholden to it." It's easy to dismiss the palace-restoration movement as kitschy Disneyfication. Don't be too dismissive, says Pepchinski. "It's about how people apply meaning to the city, what they want to live with." Blumenthal, however, finds the Schloss debate troubling. "In trying to connect to history, how much does reconstruction remind us of the bad old days?"

Well he might ask. In the 1950s, officials carved the gigantic Stalinallee through the postwar rubble of East Berlin. The limitations on political discourse in the East presumably muted the obvious observation that this 2.5-mile stretch of palatial facades, triumphal gateways, and heroic towers evoked Albert Speer's imperial schemes for the Nazis. Later renamed Karl Marx Allee, the boulevard's Socialist-Realist splendor has recently been carefully restored in all its urbanistic emptiness.

Learning from Berlin?
Some observers detect a character flaw in Germans' trust in the redemptive or corrective power of architecture. After all, if tragic history is reconciled through architecture, does that free people of personal responsibility-a dismissive "we've dealt with that, now let's move on" attitude? Many decent people thought that Germany's deep-seated love and commitment to culture would prevent Nazi barbarity. Many Jews who thought that way paid with their lives.

The focus on history, memory and on urban identity can strike the outsider as an obsessive kind of navel-gazing, but it is part of a genuine transformation, say even hardened skeptics. Daniel Libeskind, who has fought many battles over how history should be presented in his own buildings and elsewhere in Berlin, admires the fact that "People see these buildings as expressions of the force of history rather than as about themselves." They hope to bequeath to the future a promising legacy in the city they're building. "Every building here, even an office building, has some visibility, and people ask what it will look like and why it is that way," continues Libeskind. "I'm expected to defend my designs."

In the wake of autumn's terror attacks, Americans learned that they had few places which represented their united values. There are few places to grieve as a community or to sort out together what has happened. Can American cities learn from Berlin's example? "There's a huge difference in how society is organized and does things," says Michael Blumenthal. "Architectural structures are executed to have a connection to each other," he adds. "They are not done just to make money, they are done to relate to history and to have a certain collegiality to them that the public accepts. In Germany, societal needs are met with public funds and there is clearly a more coherent and comprehensive view.

"There are negatives in Europe," he adds. "It's heavily bureaucratized; things take a lot of time; it's not efficient. But it does have that positive effect." Libeskind, who practiced for several years in Los Angeles, agrees. "In America, the private world of power and money is seen as an inevitable force that dictates city form. And so architecture becomes little more than advertising. In Berlin, as in the rest of Europe, there is a notion that public space and civic space are important and of concern to everyone. Dealing with that can be difficult, but it's why I'm still here."

In spite of the monumental effort, Berlin is far from "finished." The planned cluster of skyscrapers has yet to rise from the asphalted expanses of the East's once shiny showpiece at Alexanderplatz. Among the city's cultural gems, its Museum Island remains a romantic semi-ruin as lack of funds has drastically slowed renovation and reinstallation. Berlin is still visibly wounded from the depredations of war and political division. Its endless miles of precast-concrete housing blocks are dispiriting. But colorful, provisional forms of emergent capitalism poke out of the city's many disused corners. In short, the city remains alive and open to possibility.

"The attempt to create homogeneity was not successful," says Matthias Sauerbruch. "It denied what is Berlin's foremost characteristic, which is of collage or fragmentation or palimpsest. It's never been a complete city in the Parisian sense. I guess that makes it more American."

The old cliché in this city is, as Karl Schefler wrote, that it is "forever to become and never to be." That may truly be the modern condition, not just in Berlin, but in cities everywhere; perhaps the best they can hope for and all that they can represent.

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