Reciprocal reasons justify historians emphasizing the modern era when studying Berlin’s
architectural history: the sheer amount built and the sheer amount destroyed. Unique
among European capitals, Berlin exemplifies both formative dynamism and annihilative
zest. Between the German unification and reunification (1871–1991), razing spoke as
much as raising—and each still speaks today.
In 1800 Berlin was still a moderate, regional city. Centuries of accommodating the
Hohenzollern and their baroque and neo-classical edifices (by Schülters and Schinkel,
respectively) added dignity, not development. However, by 1900, Berlin emerged a
continental parvenu—an empire seat whose aggregate population had multiplied 15 times
(from 170,000 to 2.7 million), making it Europe’s third-ranked metropolis and possibly
the most densely inhabited. Heavy industry and railway centraliza tion induced
immigration, necessitating rapid, blanketing, polycentric growth. Mietskas ernen (rental barracks)
distended outward from the historical kernel on vast blocks. These massive tenements
(sometimes of six stories and five communicating courtyards) housed 90 percent of
Berliners. Urbanist Werner Hegemann decried this human warehousing. Uncontrolled
speculation overran planning; fervid rebuilding followed demolition. Metropolitan Berlin
became an amnesic place. A newly emerging citizen, the blasé flâneur, roamed bustling streets;
sociologists (Franz Hessel and Georg Simmel) were fascinated and repelled. The only
parallel to Berlin’s demographic and economic dynamism was Chicago—a comparison
Mark Twain made. Historical Berlin’s attrition, of course, ultimately resulted from more
than this recycling. The only parallel in warfare, ruination, and division was, ironically,
Jerusalem—a comparison Harry Truman made.
Berlin’s “tradition of no traditions” spawned the 20th century’s preeminent
architectural avant-garde. There was so much to build and so few precedents. While the
19th century’s dawning brought Berlin Schinkel’s brilliance, its ending offered no
comparison. Wilhelmine architecture (1888–1918), named for Germany’s last Kaiser,
Wilhelm II, was an unsteady, eclectic transplant. Wallot’s bombastic Reichstag (1884–
94) and Kark and Raschdorff’s s grandiose Cathedral (1894–1905) were much criticized.
Jugendstil barely touched Berlin despite Henry van de Velde’s brief stay. Bland, stuccoed
brick boxes defined the city. Hints toward a purposefully “reductive” architecture existed,
such as Alfred Messel’s Wertheim Department Store (1904). Radicalism flourished
unchallenged within Berlin’s aesthetic neutrality. World War I reinforced this. Although
many nations were startled into modernity by mechanized war, Germany (like another
Entries A–F 251
subsequent architectural avant-garde center, Russia) abandoned its conservative political
and social institutions through abandoning its monarchy.
Heavy industry’s futurism imprinted Berlin’s architecture. Berlin rode the industrial
revolution’s second wave, a half century after England’s first push. Berlin meant not
spinning mills but combustion engines, electricity, and intraurban transportation. The
world’s first electric trolley originated here (1881). In this utilitarian Fabriks tadt (factory city),
functionalism was the natural order. To prosper, new building tasks—the industrial elite’s
manufacturing facilities, the consumer bourgeoisie’s department stores and offices, and
the proletariat’s mass housing—needed solutions. Berlin’s technological ascendancy
paralleled the rise of steel, glass, and reinforced concrete. A city still becoming, not
being, Berlin liberally explored these new typologies and materials.
Berlin’s 20th-century architectural pageant was not just prescient but stylistically
comprehensive. Berlin respected “orthodox” modernism’s mode (Bauhaus
rationalism/functionalism) but also cherished modernism’s “other” mode
(organicism/keneticism). Only 20th-century Helsinki—through Alvar Aalto—could
compare in dedication to naturalistic automatism. Berlin bred strident variants of both the
“orthodox” and “other” modes: die neue Sachlichkeit (the New Objectivity) and Expressionism.
Collaborative groups offered solidarity among cacophony. Although Germany overall
excelled at this (as the Deutsche Werkbund’s Munich 1907 founding shows), Berlin after
World War I particularly fostered associations: Walter Gropius’s “Arbeitsrat für Kunst”
(1918, later fused with the propagandist “Novembergruppe”); Hugo Häring and Mies van
der Rohe’s antiestablishment “Der Ring” (1924); and Bruno Taut, Paul Scheerbart, and
Hans Scharoun’s Gläserne Kette (Glass Chain, 1919–20)—this last an Utopian euphoria
dedicated to crystalline mountain forms. Peter Behrens, Erich Mendelsohn, Hans Poelzig,
and Ludwig Hilberseimer plied these circles. Berlin’s commitment to competitions also
fostered diversity (continuing into today). Paper architecture thrived. Vying visionary
alternatives brought everything before the public. Architecture’s exuberance paralleled
Berlin’s arts—the Dada montagists’ nihilism, the German Expressionist painters’
ferocious hues, Fritz Lang’s metropolitan expose films, and Bertolt Brecht’s theater of
critical verity.
Straddling World War I, two successive architectural revolutions swept
Berlin. First came Behrens’s reification of the industrial “idea.” His AEG
Turbine Factory (1908–09) created an unexpectedly monumental temple
celebrating mass production. Behrens’s atelier (where Gropius and Mies
schooled) transformed Berlin-Moabit into the world’s most technical and
representational industrialized district. Berlin became symbolic: no mere
metropolis but an “electropolis.”
Neue Nationalgalerie, detail (New
National Gallery), designed by Mies
van der Rohe (1962–68)The second revolution, after the war,
posited and probed the aesthetic binary of Neue Sachlichkeit versus Expressionism—a
stylistic controversy embroiling Mendelsohn, Poelzig, Mies, and others, with Gropius contributing from the
Bauhaus. During the Weimar Republic, Berlin focused Europe’s avant-garde
architectural debate. The volumetric clarity and dryly “objective” tectonic of Mies’s
Concrete Office proposal (1922–23) countered against the organic complexity of
Poelzig’s Grosses Schauspielhaus (1919) and Mendelsohn’s Einstein Tower (1920–24) in
Potsdam. Yet positions fluctuated. Mendelsohn, although inspired by relativity’s
indeterminacy at Potsdam, celebrated constructional pragmatism in his Luckenwalde Hat
Factory (1921–23). Mies’s 1921 Friedrichstrasse Competition project simultaneously
presented the competing aesthetics in stark, orthographic stalemate: unrelenting
rationalism in section intersected by exuberant Expressionism in plan. Here, Mies fed a
Glass Chain crystal through a Sachlichkeit slicer, saving and stacking only the repetitive segments
from its middle girth. Gropius also vacillated. Expressionist balconies blurred his 1922
unbuilt Chicago Tribune Competition entry’s tectonic lucidity. Gradually, Berlin
architects reached better syntheses—Emil Fahrenkamp’s Shellhaus office block (1930–
Entries A–F 253
31) or Mendelsohn’s commercial Columbushaus (1931–32). The very fact that Berlin
architects promoted commercial architecture to an aesthetically significant task was as
important as this stylistic debate.
Weimar Berlin did not ignore social issues during this aesthetic deliberation. In
addition to “representing” elite industries and bourgeois commerce, Berlin sought
eminence in proletariat housing. Berlin’s Mietskasernen spawned a “back-to-the-earth” reform
movement favoring decentralization. Like other German cities (such as Frankfurt under
Ernst May), Berlin took inspiration from Raymond Unwin’s pleas for rural tranquility.
Conditions were so adverse that benevolent paternalism during late imperial Berlin
generated several outlying Siedlungen (low-density settlements of minimum dwellings infused with
light and air). Results accelerated with the Republic. Companies began paternalistically
sponsoring employee housing; gradually boroughs took over, then the city. S iedlung Lindenhof (1919–20),
an early collaboration between Martin Wagner (soon to be Berlin’s Building
Commissioner) and Bruno Taut (of Cologne’s 1914 Werkbund Exhibition fame), had
“Nuremberg” roofs and gables that mimicked “bourgeois-traditional” aesthetics. In 1920
Berlin became Greater Berlin; 93 separate polities united, creating the legal means to
reconfigure what was now physically the largest city in Europe. Promulgating tax and
interest relief, the Social Democrats engendered cooperatives such as GEHAG (Public
Benefit Homestead, Savings, and Building Corporation). These, in aggregate, realized
135,000 units housing 500,000 people between 1924 and 1930.
Most famous was Wagner and Taut’s GEHAG-sponsored Hufeisen (Horseshoe) S iedlung of garden
walk-ups in outlying Britz (1925–31). Its open community green spaces and shared
facilities were socially progressive. Modernist aesthetics also appeared—continuous flat
roofs, horizontal lines, clean surfaces, and cantilevers. Taut felt that this appearance
manifested the complex’s collective goals. Similar Siedlungen followed, such as Wagner, Taut, and
Häring’s Onkel-Toms-Hütte (1926–32) in Zehlendorf, again GEHAG sponsored. By 1928, with the
housing crisis still deteriorating citywide, this low-scaled density was questioned.
Wagner speculated that only G roβs iedlungen (taller, denser developments) could answer the need. The
Bauhaus-affiliated trio of Gropius, Hilberseimer, and Marcel Breuer pro duced high-rise
competition studies for Berlin reaching to 18 stories. Although no tall slabs materialized,
projects of over four stories (lacking immediate access to the ground) appeared on
superblocks nearer the city center, subdivided into “row form” configurations prefiguring
modernism’s later repetitiveness, scalelessness, and obsessiveness (regarding solar
orientation). Greater density did allow further collectivist gestures, such as centralized
mechanical plants.
Compared with Stuttgart’s Weissenhofsiedlung (1927), these projects were technically
conservative. Early talk of Fordist/Taylorist production methods was set aside. The
emphasis remained on social issues and their aesthetic representation. Modernism’s
revolutionary “new style” was often conflated with the “new society” during Weimar, as
Lane (1968) details, resulting in a highly politicized, even propagandistic, architecture.
Government support reinforced this reading. The Nazis took note, deriding Weimar
housing’s appearance as “Bolshevist.” Berlin’s Communist Party, ironically, had nothing
to do with these projects because it opposed any accommodation with the “corrupt”
bourgeois system.
The 1930–31 worldwide economic collapse halted Berlin’s social housing experiment,
leaving the Nazis to beat a dead horse. Just as the “Brown” cloud approached, Berlin’s
1931 Building Exhibition (titled “Dwelling of Our Time”) introduced modernism to a
wider audience. Berlin’s historicist tradition of outstanding villas in suburban districts
(Hermann Muthesius’s 1907–08 half-timbered Haus Freudenberg or Behrens’s 1911–12
classical Haus Wiegand) had already been updated with Hans and Wassili Luckhardt’s Le
Corbusian Zwei Einfamilienhäuser (1928) and Mendelsohn’s Expressionist Haus
Sternefeld (1924). Yet the 1931 Exhibition publicly interjected “Bolshevist” aesthetics
into bourgeois—as opposed to proletariat—homes. Mies translated his German Pavilion
at Barcelona into a lush exhibit house that the Nazis labeled a “horse stable.”
Though grand planners, Berlin’s Nazis built little. Only bits survive—such as Ernst
Sagebiel’s Aviation Ministry (1936–37) and Tempelhof Airport (1936–41). Hitler
impacted modernism not through buildings but inadvertently through expellant “gifts”
(mostly to the United States—Gropius, Mies, and ultimately Mendelsohn). Although
Entries A–F 255
architecture—the “Word in Stone”—was critical to Hitler’s ideological program, it
proved too costly after his war machine’s ignition. Still, until the bitter end, Hitler
crouched as amateur architect over vast models with his amanuensis, Albert Speer. How
sad for the profession that the 20th-century leader most architecturally impassioned was a
tasteless criminal. Hitler’s architectural proclivities were vivid—a reactionary
parochialism intended to resist “Bolshevist” cosmopolitanism and a perdurable
monumentality in keeping with world domination. As Nazi preferences hardened, the
Dessau Bauhaus was chased to Berlin (during Mies’s directorate), where the Gestapo
finally padlocked it. Nazi aesthetics mirrored—with opposing predilection—the Weimar
Socialists’ belief that architectural style symbolized specific political views. However,
the Nazis added a destructive, racist edge. The Nazi-fomented Kris tallnacht (Night of Broken Glass,
1938) saw 9 of 12 Berlin synagogues aflame, including Ehrenfried Hessel’s famed
Fasanenstraße Temple (1912).
Speer’s New Chancellery expansion (1938–39) housed Hitler. Stretching an
intimidating quarter mile, its 480-foot gallery doubled the length of Versailles’ Hall of
Mirrors. Hypertrophy drained Speer’s classicism of all humanism (entasis, for example,
disappeared). Megalomania roamed across Speer’s unrealized “Germania” Berlin Plan
(1937–42). This north/south avenue connected an 825-foot-diameter rotunda and 400-
foot-high triumphal arch. Contemporary praise of Speer (Krier, 1985) ignores his errors.
Speer blithely muffed axial transitions any Beaux-Arts journeyman could manage.
Existing conditions at the Chancellery necessitated a slight axial rotation. Speer properly
positioned a “Round Hall” to resolve this, then neglected to utilize it, merely crimping the
bend within the poché. Where his Berlin Plan’s axis turned, he positioned his gargantuan
rotunda but again earned no profit. The existing Reichstag, which Hitler wanted
incorporated into “Germania,” had been built several degrees shy of due north/south.
Speer merely ignored this, causing one side of his grand plaza to warp bizarrely. Speer’s
architectural goose-stepping could successfully accommodate only 4 of the 360 compass
degrees.
In 1943 the Western Allies launched the aerial Battle of Berlin. By 1945 incendiary
phosphorous had consumed 70 percent of the city’s center and 1.5 million Berliners’
homes. Soviet shelling came next, then tanks and capitulation. Only outlying Mietskasernen and Siedlungen
escaped unscathed. “Quadrasectioning” ensued; apportionments observed Berlin’s 20
districts—six falling American, four British, two French, and eight Soviet (including Mitte, the
historical kernel containing Schinkel’s battered works). From Berlin’s ceremonial
remnants, ideological sterilization claimed further shares. Between 1947 and 1951, the
standing walls of the Hohenzollern Stadtschloss and Hitler’s New Chancellery in the
Soviet sector and the Gestapo’s headquarters at the Prinz-Albrecht-Palais (once renovated
by Schinkel) in the American were dynamited.
Devastation opened possibilities for restructuring the unplanned Moloch that Berlin
had become. The Soviets, first on the scene, named Scharoun “City Architect.” Though
he would serve a mere year, the former Glass Chain Expressionist gained prominence in
postwar Berlin. Immediately, he formed the Planungs-Kollektiv, which by 1946 proposed the city’s
dissolution into more manageable, picturesquely “organic” neighborhoods. Rubble
clearance and infrastructure rigidity prevented any action. After losing his post, Scharoun
pressed forward with a lyrical housing plan (1949) for the bombed-out, Soviet-controlled
Friedrichshain district. However, as the Communist’s massive Berlin-Treptow victory
Encyclopedia of 20th-century architecture 256
monument (1947–48) foretold, modernism had scant future in the Soviet sector. In the
Soviet Union, the “Constructivist versus traditionalist” debate ended by 1934; socialist
realism’s pseudoclassicism triumphed. Once East Germany achieved statehood with East
Berlin as capital (1949), the Stalinist aesthetic of “Progressive Tradition” was imposed.
Apparatchiks attacked modernism (both Berliner modes) as formalist, cosmopolitan, and
decadent. Scharoun’s Friedrichshain plan was shelved. Stalinallee (1952–60) emerged
instead—a mile-long avenue of housing reminiscent of Moscow’s Gorky Street, with
sculpted street walls of symmetrically ponderous, tripartite, pilastered facades by various
architectural cooperatives (spearheaded by Hermann Henselmann, a chameleon who had
conveniently renounced his own Bauhaus work).
As division’s reality settled in, the West responded with show-piece housing of its
own: the 1957 Interbau Hansaviertel district (a western bombed-out zone). A consciously
international team of 53 architects representing 14 countries (including Aalto and Oscar
Niemeyer) created a medley of loosely grouped, reinforced-concrete point blocks and
slabs. Yet Hansaviertel’s Progressivism rapidly seemed as superficially clichéd as
Stalinallee’s regressive pomposity. Conventional flats, dressed in gratuitously variegated
balcony rhythms, rested on Le Corbusiersian stilts. For the same exhibition but on a
distant site, Le Corbusier gave West Berlin an “authentic” knockoff of his Marseilles Unité.
Also for the exhibition, the United States presented Berlin with Hugh Stubbins’s
Kongresshalle (1956–57)—a suspended hyperbolic paraboloid that became something of
a technological “gift horse” when one arch collapsed in 1980. More evocative of
modernism’s continued viability was Egon Eiermannn’s Kaiser-Wilhelm-
Gedächtniskirche reconstruction (Memorial Church, 1957–63). Movingly preserving
fragments of the bombing’s “zero hour,” when time stopped, this dark stained-glass
honey-comb increasingly became the unofficial architectural symbol of West Berlin’s
island vigil. Western dreams of urban reunification continued with the Hauptstadt Berlin
competition ignoring the city’s division (1959).
In 1954 Nikita Khrushchev began attacking Stalinist architecture.
Modernist slabs gradually rose in East Berlin. Yet just as the ideological
combatants’ aesthetics aligned, physical separation heightened. In 1961 a
102.5-mile “Wall”—Berlin’s most famously infamous edifice—encircled
the Western enclave as an “Antifascist Protective Barrier.” The Cold War
stalemate’s face, it became the 20th century’s most sublimely meaningful
construction. As Baker (1993) notes, the Wall evolved through several
“generations.” First came an improvised breeze block and barbed-wire
barrier. Next was a “lollipop” profile of stacked, prefabricated, asbestosstoked
concrete panels crowned with a rounded pipe denying purchase to
grappling hooks. Last was a massively prefabricated L section, also round
capped, with its foot pointing toward East Berlin to prevent overturning in
an imagined Western attack (and also escape by digging). Formidable as
these variants became, it was open space, not the Wall, that killed (122 or
more times). The Wall delimited a death strip (often hundreds of meters
wide, with watchtowers, lights, and dog runs), sandwiched by a second
Entries A–F 257
barrier of concrete or barbed wire. This strip necessitated demolition of
many square miles of East Berlin’s adjoining neighborhoods, including
churches. To West Berlin, only the smooth backside of the L showed—the
ultimate in Neue Sachlichkeit aesthetics, soon daubed with gorgeous graffiti.
Standardization of construction components passed a critical test at the
Wall. Gradually, satellite towns of grim, cratelike prefabricated housing
ringed the East (the Plattenbau of Marzhan, Hohenschönhausen, and Hellersdorf).
The West’s satellites, Märkisches Viertel (1963–74) and Gropiusstadt
(1962–72), bared similarity.
Absolute division exacerbated Berlin’s preexisting polycentrism. Through rival
“centers,” both ideologies sought urban “wholeness.” The East’s path was governmental
and bland; the West’s cultural and heterogeneous. In the old kernel, the Communists’
curtain-wall “Palace of the Republic” usurped the site of the Hohenzollern Stadtschloss.
Schinkel’s Bauakademie was razed (1961–62), making way for the Foreign Ministry’s
morose white slab. A symbolically assertive 365-meter Television Tower (1965–69) leapt
from nearby Alexanderplatz. Vast seas of empty pavement awaited rallies. The West,
lacking federal presence, responded with Kulturforum—a diffusely suburbanized zone,
where Scharoun’s ecstatic Philharmonic and Staatsbibliothek (1960–63, 1967–76) jostled
with Mies’s silent Neue National-galerie (1965–68). Expressionism again confronted Neue Sachlichkeit.
Swathes of arterial green space, as crippling to urbanism as the East’s barren plazas, ran
between. Nearby, Hentrich and Petschnigg’s Europa Center (1965), an echo of Skidmore,
Owings and Merrill’s New York Lever House, capped the chic Kürfurstendamm.
American design principles settled heavily on West Berlin.
Postmodernism in West Berlin invoked “critical reconstruction” as urban tonic.
Promoted by Josef Paul Kleihues (1987), this “anti-Hansaviertel” methodology respected
traditional street lines and block heights in healing rent urban fabric. Its manifestation
was the IBA (International Building Exposition, 1984–87), celebrating Berlin’s 750th
anniversary. Titled “living in the city,” IBA fostered midscale housing in-fill in five
Berlin districts by international and German architects—Aldo Rossi, John Hejduk,
Charles Moore, Peter Eisenman, Rob Krier, Oswald Mathias Ungers, and others.
Nonhousing projects included James Stirling’s Berlin Science Center (1984–87) and,
consistent with Berlin’s traditional interest in technological architecture, Gustav Peichl’s
Phosphate Elimination Plant (1981–85). The results, both sober and meretricious,
succeeded in keeping the divided city in the architectural spotlight, even as its
schizophrenic cachet aged. Critical reconstruction touched the East, too, in the historicist
re-creation of the Nikolai Quarter (also celebrating the anniversary). The West snubbed
this as kitsch.
The Wall and East Germany’s collapse in 1989 unleashed startling development
pressures. Construction cranes laced the sky, as the surreal transmogrification from
ideological battle-ground to world corporate and financial center began. Traffic, never an
issue in circumscribed West Berlin, exploded overnight. The Wall, instantaneously a
commodity, was chipped to bits, its best graffiti-carrying segments sold to museums
(only a few lengths remained in situ, with one inaugurated as a Wall Memorial in 1998).
Public planning commenced only following German reunification and the election of a
unified Berlin city council in late 1990. Berlin’s close victory in the 1991 vote to move
Encyclopedia of 20th-century architecture 258
the federal seat from Bonn opened the need for a wholly reconfigured capital, a task
exceeding even François Mitterrand’s revitalization of Paris during the 1980s. A plethora
of raucous competitions followed.
Potsdamerplatz, lying across the Wall’s wound (between the East’s old kernel and the
West’s Kulturforum), developed first, with Sony, Daimler Benz, and others grabbing turf.
The city launched a competition to reassert control. The results prefigured a duality that
recurred throughout the 1990s: a choice between exuberant narcissism and the “sturdy
stuff” of old Prussia. A desire to celebrate Berlin’s 20th-century ethos of diversity,
discontinuity, and rupture clashed with a desire to return to (an imagined) 18th-century
historical normalcy through critical reconstruction. Selected was Hilmer and Sattler’s
restatement of blocky, continuous urbanism (though this came too late to tame Helmut
Jahn’s gesticulating Sony complex). More conservatism would follow. Hans Stimmann,
Berlin’s new building commissioner, felt that Berlin was destroyed as much by postwar
planners as by Allied bombs. Height limitations (22-meter facades), masonry stipulations,
and requirements for housing were imposed. Stimman’s ideals were attacked as a “New
Teutonia.”
Berlin’s affinity for demolition continued into the post-Wall era. East Germany’s
Foreign Ministry was razed (1995), purportedly to make way for the improbable
rebuilding of Schinkel’s Bauakademie. A scaffold and canvas mock-up of the Stadtschloß
(1993) seriously threatened the Communist “Palace of the Republic.” Economic realities
alone forced government re-use of a number of threatened Nazi office structures.
The 1992 Spreebogen competition for Germany’s new federal zone attracted 835
entries from 44 countries (but few from Eastern architects; new Berlin began on Western
terms). The site, adjoining the Reichstag, passed over the positional ghost of Speer’s
north/south axis. Given this “counterprecedent,” an east/west axial composition was
purposefully selected. This, by Axel Schultes, symbolically bridged the divided city’s
halves, giving attention to reestablishing the district’s interrupted tissue. Schultes also
won the competition for a new Federal Chancellery (1994). Both of Schultes’s schemes
assumed blocky forms. England’s Sir Norman Foster prevailed in the Reichstag
renovation competition, providing a new high-tech dome after controversy prevented his
winning proposal’s immense, tented canopy (1994–2000). A squat, elliptical doughnut
scheme by Gruber and Kleine-Kraneburg won the Presidential Office competition (1994).
As Balfour (1995) reported, disappointment grew with each announcement. Faced
with an opportunity that actually justifies the word “millennial,” Berlin’s almost complete
reliance on “sturdy stuff” deflates imagination. A signal exception is Daniel Libeskind’s
Jewish Museum addition to the Berlin Museum (1993–96). Harrowed with history yet
never witnessed before, this work, like Eiermannn’s Memorial Church, is an expression
of 20th-century architecture’s potential to speak of a future that mournfully roots but
never enslaves itself to the past. This should be new/old Berlin—a place of reciprocal
tension.
