Mauerfall, Part 1

I’m not one for being up-to-date or cutting edge with my blog content (I’m more of a ponderer) but even I have noticed that 2009 is of course the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall.

To this end, I thought I’d start a series of posts about Berlin places and buildings on its route. I’m not doing them in a particular order, but I might at some point renumber these to make a sort of ad hoc guide. There’s actually a very good cycle guide to the entire route (available only in german as far as I know) nearly all of which we’ve cycled. There’s a bit to the north of Berlin which we missed, because we found a rather good restaurant, and lunch ran over schedule.  You can do it in three days comfortably – we just cycled to the nearest station and came home each evening, then restarted the next day at the same point, so I can’t make recommendations for accomodation.

Anyway, I’ve elected to start at Michael-Kirch-Platz, which is on the left of the map below, covered in red and blue pointers. (Does anyone know how to switch these off? Let me know – I’m probably just being dumb.)

View Larger Map

I feel really strongly that if you want to get a feel for the wall and its history, far better to get a good book on it and walk some stretches like this, away from Checkpoint Charlie and the tourists.

In case you didn’t know, the Wall (die Mauer) was not really a wall as such – more a series of fences, barriers and heavily guarded strips which formed an inpenetrable barrier around West Berlin.  In central Berlin the outermost line usually took the form of the familiar concrete slabs with tubular concrete section on top that’s become the image of ‘The Wall’.  There’s still bits all over the place:

All this sort of thing you can read elsewhere I’m sure, so back to Michael-Kirk-Platz.  It’s one of those many spots in Berlin where you find yourself so surrounded by history that the place seems somehow to be resting, exhausted, hoping for a quiet life from now on.  The wall ran across the bridge over the Spree (top right hand corner of map) then followed the curve of the old Luisenstadt canal (filled in early in the 20th century but its route still clearly visible, and now a long thin park) down to Michael-Kirk-Platz, where there is still a small lake remaining, before dropping south.  Confusingly, everything to the south and east of the wall at this point was in West Berlin, everything to the north and west was in East Berlin.

It emphasizes Kreuzberg’s strange isolated location in the already isolated West Berlin of the Cold War years; the allies divided Berlin into sectors which generally followed the district lines, and the wall followed these too when it went up, so at Michael-Kirk-Platz divided Kreuzberg in the south-east from Mitte, the central district of the East German capital.

The Kirk (church) itself was heavily damaged in WWII bombing and the nave is now just a shell; only the transepts, main tower and apse are now enclosed and in use:

This was on a poster by the entrance – you can clearly see the small lake and the route of the disused canal heading running south:

Another image from the board, showing the wall pre-1989.  You can just make out a guard tower to the right, in the ‘death strip’.  The church was in West Berlin:

Taking a walk around the Platz is a brief history of the last 100 years of building in Berlin.  taking a turn about the square from north west, anticlockwise:

First are a group of refurbished east german Plattenbau housing blocks:

…standing right next to some recent new apartment blocks – nothing to write home about in architectural terms, but representative of post-Wall reconstruction and of the area’s not-so-creeping gentrification:

The apartments face across the lake to older 19th century blocks – before 1989 this would have been a view looking from East Berlin over the wall into the West (the wall running where the line of trees is).  I’m often struck by how strange a situation it all was – the two worlds able to look across at each other every day:

Then, on a different note, a piece of seminal early modernism by Bruno Taut, mentioned in my earlier post:

Off to its left is a block which I know nothing about – at first glance an east german Plattenbau, but on closer inspection older, perhaps Nazi-era (I think) by the stonework detailing.  Currently a local activist squat by the look of it:

Walking away from the Platz along the line of the canal/Wall to the north, you witness the amazing contrast between the carefully kept park, with new private apartments behind:

and immediately opposite, an increasingly rare scene here – people living in that other place, in a range of (often) dilapidated vehicles and makeshift buildings:

Refurbished buildings still stand alone in large open plots, created by allied bombing, and postwar clearance, and now a unique and integral part of Berlin’s urbanity:

And of course that strange self-built ‘Haus am Mauer’:

Guerillas in the midst (of cabbages)

A couple of weeks back there was an attempted mid-summer-night’s mass squatting of Tempelhof Airport, so we went to see how things were going, but somehow ended up behind the line of police on Columbiadamm holding back the would-be squatters.  (They weren’t physically holding them back – most of the protesters were over in the adjoining park, making happy with techno.)

The purpose of the squat (as I understand it) was to highlight opposition to the creeping gentrification of Berlin, typified in the squatters view, by the latest plans for the recently defunct Tempelhof.  Gentrification in Berlin is a subject that I’m quite confused about.  Where, I often ask myself, do all the people come from rich enough to buy all the luxury appartments which continue to spring up around Prenzlauerberg and other parts of the city? (and increasingly in Kreuzberg 36).  Is there no recession?  Does Berlin have lots of well paid jobs suddenly, rather than a problem with long term structural unemployment, aided by an ever increasing numnber of out of work actors/writers/musicians?

More thoughts on that soon, but anyway, back at the airport, where, after we’d nervously ‘entshuldigunged’ our way through the police wall from the wrong side, my girlfriend commented to me that what they really should be trying is guerilla gardening.  “Why doesn’t someone break through the fence with some gardening equipment and plant rows of carrots and such?” she said.

Now, the Tempelhof site is colossal – look at it here on Google maps, and you realise just how big.  So I don’t lie awake worrying that the whole thing will be turned into luxury housing.  Germany doesn’t have enough people who could afford that much luxury (or so I assume ).  But it does seem a shame that there’s not something a bit more radical or inspired on the cards.  The final three in the current competition are the UK’s Chora/Gross Max, Urban essences Architektur / Lützow 7 Landschaftsarchitektur*, and Graft Architekten / Büro Kiefer Landschaftsarchitektur, the latter both in Berlin.  Some links here, here and here.

There’s also an exhibition on until 10 July, 12-19.00 Uhr, at Gewerbehof Orco-GSG, Gneisenaustraße 66/67, 10961 Berlin.

*I was going to link to individual sites here, but can’t be bothered.  Architects: stop doing your sites in Flash – it’s rubbish, looks overdesigned and you can’t link to individual pages.

About 15 years ago there was a previous competition, which included a typically leftfield entry from the UK’s Will Alsop (then as Alsop & Störmer):

I’m not entirely sure what an ‘economic activator’ is, but I like the idea of a big outdoor venue, a forest, canal, city farm, and…. Schrebergartens.  Schrebergartens are part of the Berlin and wider german tradition of living in apartments but putting all the gardens together nearby.  We spent much of last weekend enjoying some of the 48 Stunden Neukölln events, but in particular these ‘Kolonies‘, some of which were open to the public just for the weekend.  I’m going to write some more on this (have been off exploring some others further afield) but not right now, as must rush, and have decided better to post short and more often than my usual habit of thinking about something for weeks then not doing it at all.

PS – was just looking for a good image from the web, and notice that someone else already has.  So read theirs (in french) until I get round to it.

Archi-Stammtisch no.2

After the success of the last meetup (small but perfectly formed), I thought I’d do another one.  So if you fancy joining us to discuss architecture, urbanism, or anything else (there was much talk about cake baking last time) do join us:

Wednesday 1st July, 8pm, upstairs at Sankt Oberholz:

http://www.qype.com/place/492-Sankt-Oberholz-Berlin

I’ll be easy to spot – I’m the one without the Mac Powerbook.

Useful to know if you’re coming, so I have an idea of numbers – jim_hudson33@yahoo.co.uk.

Opening Doors

I think we’ve already established that they’re much better at keeping up to date with archi-related events and such like over at Baustelle, but undaunted, I note that this coming weekend is something of an architecture fest: as part of the nationwide Tag der Architektur, Berlin will be having not only a Tag der Architektur but a Tag der offenen Architekturbüros as well.

So essentially you can spend your entire weekend being extremely nosey in architects’ offices, and maybe even looking at some buildings.

It’s annoying that on the very same weekend is 48 Stunden Neukölln, which includes an exhibition called reuterland , which I’d like to see.

It’s also a friend’s birthday BBQ on sunday.  But you don’t have to go to that.

(image is sc11 Baugruppenprojekt by zanderroth architekten)

Traces of Terror

Last winter I visited Mittelbau-Dora, one of the concentration camps which used slave labour to build V2 rockets late in the war.   It left a strong impression: a bleak snowscape with occasional fragments of the camp’s buildings and fences, and the factory tunnels where inmates were worked to death.  What I found most shocking was not the existence of the Dora camp itself, but the museum’s exhibit on the many smaller sub-camps which existed across the region.  Many of these camps were based in towns and villages, where they provided slave labour to local businesses.  It’s easier for us to think of the camps as somewhere else, away from the public eye – ‘it wasn’t our fault, we didn’t know about it’.  Records of these ‘publicly integrated’ arrangements give the lie to such an argument.

The introduction to Traces of Terror: Sites of Nazi Tyranny in Berlin makes the point that museums alone are unable to keep the public’s memory of the Holocaust alive, and that knowledge of sites and buildings where atrocities were planned or carried out is an essential part of our historical understanding.  Unlike  Holocaust museums in the US and elsewhere, such museums in Germany and Austria “… would be stylish counterfeits to lessen the burden of being confronted with the authentic.  Imagine a flash, post-modern museum in Berlin compared to Ravensbrück, where reality can be experienced and comprehended.”

It’s a point that I agree with; even though Berlin is severely lacking in good recent architecture, and Peter Zumthor is a very good architect (and not at all ‘flash’) I do think that, had his building been completed at the Topography of Terror site, it would have become as much a mecca for architecture students, than a place for marking perpetrators.

This book is not a record of building’s erected around Berlin by the Nazi regime, but rather a thoughtful analysis of key sites. Some of these, such as Ernst Sagebiel’s Reich Air Ministry, we know as architectural symbols of the Third Reich; stripped neoclassicism, imposing, bombastic.  Other locations played a more complex role, for instance the  SA-Stormlokale (’Storm Locals’, I guess) – bars and restaurants which served as bases for the SA (the paramilitary group which provided the ‘muscle’ for the Nazi’s rise to power).  The basements were often used as prisons and torture rooms, and they also became ad hoc police stations when the SA became officially sanctioned from 1933.

It’s also a sad reminder of how Berlin paid the price for the crimes of the Nazis.  Many of the buildings featured are shown in pre and postwar condition, as well as later, during the cold war and beyond.  The photographic cycle of baroque edifice / bombed out shell / rainswept parking lot / bland Commerzbank office is a salutory lesson.

To praise this book is not, of course, to criticise such guides as Matthias Donath’s Architektur in Berlin 1933-1945, (there’s a fuller version in german) which covers key buildings erected during the regime – I’ve found this an essential in trying to understand the Nazi’s architectural legacy, rather than just as a trainspotter’s guide.  But Traces of Terror, with its careful commentary on each site and building, slowly builds the argument that I clumsily attempted at the beginning of this post; that to understand how these atrocities occurred, it’s important to realise that they took place in public view: at Westhafen S-Bahn station, where hundreds of thousands were deported to ghettos and death camps in the east, or at a concentration camp, not hidden away in woodland, but in a brewery in the middle of Oranienberg.

Traces of Terror – Sites of Nazi Tyranny in Berlin
Spuren des Terrors – Stätten nationalsozialistischer Gewaltherrschaft in Berlin

with a foreward by Paul Spiegel

Google link

English / german, Verlagshaus Braun, 2002

Architecture Films at the Deutsches Historisches Museum

William at Baustelle mentioned to me last night that the Deutsches Historisches Museum is running a series of architectural film screenings: ‘Kunst des Dokuments – Architektur‘.  It’s every thursday – tonight’s is Norman Foster’s Gherkin.

Worth going along not least to see the Zeughaus Kino itself, a ’superb example of ‘60s socialist functionalism’.

I would have flagged this up previously, but the DHM bombards me with such a huge number of press emails that I got behind with reading them, so that they piled up at the rate of several a day and I lost track.  Sorry!

Archi-meetup, Wednesday 10th June

It’s short notice, but I’m meeting up with a few people that I’ve met via this blog, to talk architecty-urbany things, this wednesday evening at a bar in Mitte. Might try and make it a regular thing if it goes well.

8pm at Sankt Oberholz:

http://www.qype.com/place/492-Sankt-Oberholz-Berlin

Let me know if you’re coming, as if there’s quite a few people we’ll need to reserve a larger table:

jim_hudson33@yahoo.co.uk.

Post meeting note: it did go well, so I will be doing it again!

Bruno Taut – Meister des farbigen bauens in Berlin / Master of colourful architecture in Berlin

Verlagshaus Braun, 2008.  Edited by the Deutscher Werkbund Berlin.

Majority of text in german and english, with some of the english texts slightly summarised. Short building descriptions are in german only, but fairly easy to work out.

Amazon link

Bruno Taut is accepted as one of the founding fathers of modern architecture, although his work was apparently mocked at the time by the press as an architect of ‘little people’s happiness’, which in retrospect seems an odd sort of insult.  He’s also one of those, like Poelzig or Mies, whose designs spanned the pre-modern to the modern; it often seems to be the case with figures such as these that their early work is left out of the historical account, as it doesn’t fit with the revolutionary narrative of modernism.

Not so here – the book is both a good introduction to Taut’s work, and a well-researched and thorough guide to all of his buildings in Berlin, from 1908 onwards, both destroyed and extant.  Each project is set out with example floor plans, contemporary and original images, site location plans and text.  But it’s the chronological ordering that’s so effective, as you can clearly see the development of Taut’s ideas from some relatively undistinguished buildings, through to the colourful large scale estates mentioned in the title.  This also gives the lie to the ‘hermetically sealed’ historical view of modernism; rather, the architecture develops gradually through what we know as ‘modernist’ design, and you have the feeling that creating a sleek white minimal look was in any case not Taut’s overriding aim.  In fact the colour schemes of some of the estates, generally recently restored to their former glory and reproduced in the book, could be described politely as ‘exuberant’.

There are some good essays on Taut’s membership of the Deutscher Werkbund (who are responsible for the publication of the book itself), his work with light and colour, and the preservation of his work in later years.  Incredibly, Taut built over 10,000 apartments in Berlin.  Of Berlin’s six housing estates recently awarded UNESCO World Heritage Status, four are by Taut; the book includes an essay on the status and preservation of Taut’s legacy.  Since you ask, the four estates are:

- Tuschkastensiedlung Falkenberg, 1913-16
- Wohnstadt Carl Legien in Prenzlauer Berg, 1928-30
- Hufeisensiedlung Britz, 1925-30 (the ‘Horseshoe’ estate)
- Siedlung Schillerpark im Wedding

What was also fascinating was to discover that two of Taut’s earliest buildings are in my immediate neighbourhood, both located on what I had considered to be the architecturally barren street of Kottbusser Damm, south of the canal.  Clearly I don’t look up enough when walking down the street (I generally watch the pavement in Neukoln/Kreuzberg, where dog owners take a laissez-faire attitude).

The first is no. 2-3, a block which remained a postwar ruin until the 1980s, until it was rebuilt, bizarrely, by Inken and Hinrich Baller, who are themselves no strangers to this blog.  Originally, the block included a cinema in the lower storeys.

It’s all Taut at the front:

but Baller at the back:

Just down the road is a quite different building, but also 1909.  What strikes you most is the Arts & Crafts styling, which was never completely lost to Taut in his later work:

The book is packed with the level of detail that I like.  I was interested to note that the Haus des Deutschen Verkehrsbundes (the state traffic office) on Engeldamm, originally had its limestone facing painted over in a dark colour, which seems a little contrary to logic, but does emphasize the importance of colour in Taut’s architecture:

(Image by Julien Valle, who has also photographed brother Max Taut’s building just south on Oranienplatz. In fact he’s photographed lots of things that I meant to get round to but haven’t – well worth a look. Anyway, back at the book review…)

In some ways the sub-title ‘Master of Colourful Architecture…’ is a little misleading (as well as being slightly clunky in english) despite the inclusion of an essay on the enormous importance of colour in Taut’s work.  I make this not really as a criticism though, because what comes through most from the book is Taut’s dedication to better living conditions for ordinary people, achieved through design, and the strong influence of the english Garden City movement; more Letchworth and lawns, than Mies and modernism.

Between the Devil and the deep blue suits.

Have just been to the opening of same same but different,  a show comprising two projects by up and coming Swiss practice EM2N, at the Architektur Galerie on Karl-Marx-Allee.  It was rather good, and the free wine and pretzels were also not bad.  The two projects are ‘Toni Areal‘ – a conversion of a milk factory into an art school for 3,000 students, and a second vast neubau school project in Ordos, China, also for around 3,000 pupils.  Both projects are huge for such a young practice (founded twelve years ago) and on the face of it confidently done, in that understated but highly crafted Swiss late modernism.

But I’m coming over all ‘architecture critic’ on you; I felt a bit underdressed and overwhelmed amongst all the sharp-suited/coolly bespectacled architects and assorted in-crowd, and left well before the wine ran out.

I thought I’d take a back route home and cycled south, past the Hochhaus an der Weberwiese.  It’s a curious area, which I now realise I don’t know at all, between Karl-Marx-Allee and the ever wonderful Berghain (which, if you didn’t know, is the world’s best club – if you only have 48 hours to spend in Berlin, spend them all at Berghain). It’s like the other good Berlin clubs to the power of ten – where others occupy parts of previously abandoned factories, Berghain occupies all of a very big abandoned factory.  A strange place to pass by late on a sunday afternoon, with dazed survivors stumbling confused into the sunshine,  to the thunder-like bass throb of techno still rattling the windows.

(Image courtesy of Wikimedia / Creative Commons)

Anyway, I digress.  Between these two extreme nodes (immaculately dressed architects / sweat-drenched techno) are some apartment buildings clearly built as part of Karl-Marx-Allee, but strangely neglected.  They’re not in my miniguide to ‘the Allee’ (as I’ve just decided to refer to it) and are presumably considered of less greatness, by those in the know.  Hopefully, as is often the case, someone reading this who knows much more about it will leave a comment.

The blocks centre around the junction of Gubener Straße and Wedekindstraße:

I blogged very early on (well, about a year ago) about Karl-Marx-Allee and how much I liked it, views which have changed with time (it reads now as a bit naive), but clearly I seem to have an affinity for the underdog: I was slightly saddened by the contrast between the shiny new creations on display at the Galerie and the neglect of the buildings around the corner. Not everyone’s cup of tea, sure (well, in fact probably almost no-one’s cup of tea) but I’m drawn to them, because… well because no-one else is.  Which is just odd.

He’s not dead, he’s just resting…

I’d be the first to admit that I’m not always the most frequent of bloggers, and I could come up with all sorts of excuses for this, but I’m guessing that your time is short.  I will however just casually mention that I’ve just finished cycling from Vienna to Dresden, and therefore

a) there was not much time for blogging, and

b) wireless reception was poor in the Czech Republic, plus it’s hard to balance a keyboard on bike handlebars.

So just a quick one, to promise that I will write some proper posts shortly (I returned home to find that a publisher has sent me a whole pack of goodies, which I’ll be reviewing here as soon as I’ve read them) and to post an image sent me a while back from Pedro in Porto.  It shows part of Alvaro Siza’s Bonjour Tristesse project; Siza planned the whole block, which includes two other new structures, as well as the more familiar corner building.

I’m a big fan of Siza’s work, which generally comprises beautifully proportioned white buildings standing in perpetual southern european sunlight, like this one:

(image thanks, OunoDesign)

Whereas here in the Haupstadt, his design has been ‘Berlinified’, courtesy of the youth of Kreuzberg:

They’re not Kreuzberg youth in the picture by the way – it’s an old folks’ day centre (although the old lady pictured appears to be stealing a chair, rather than going for a chat about the old days).  It’s on Falckensteinstrasse, and there’s a very good ice cream parlour next door, if you’re out this way.  Obviously don’t forget to look at Bonjour Tristesse itself, which is out of shot to the right.