Navigating the architecture of the past in an ever-evolving city
By Jessica Reincke
BERLIN — According to Berlin city planner Manfred Kühne, Berlin is an innovative city that has a “longstanding tradition” of liking controversies, and the city’s architecture is no exception. Berlin’s 20th century history has no shortage of loaded history with traumas such as World War II and the Berlin Wall, and this has made the city’s history a necessary part of the dialogue in the architectural process.
In a recent interview in his Wilmersdorf office, Kühne discussed how architecture in Berlin has changed post World War II and after the 1989 fall of the Wall. He also offers some insight into how and why Berlin has alternated between preserving its historic buildings and eradicating them.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Q: After the fall of the Berlin Wall what did the architectural process look like?
A: In 1989 and the 1990s there were two approaches to developing former border areas especially in the inner city. One was practiced in the kind of urgency mode. It was a necessity to open the wall and reconnect the street networks, the infrastructure networks, and to revitalize Berlin as a unified system. On the other hand, there was a long term development strategy, elaborated and conceived in the context of an international building exhibition in West Berlin in the 1980s. And the focus of this strategy was to redevelop, to refurbish existing quarters and to refill extremely large voids as a result of wartime destruction and post-war demolition in East and West.
The second strategy has the name ‘critical reconstruction.’ …There was research about the former street network, the system of public open spaces, the greenery, and so on. And then master plans were developed that tried to steer the planning process according to the lost historical blocks and building typologies. But, the critical aspect was that the local people… developed the first master plan… They advocated to get new infrastructures like kindergartens, schools, social facilities, and cultural facilities. So for every part of the inner city in the master plan processes there was a negotiated balance between the reestablishment of the historic fabric of the 18th and 19th century, and contemporary needs.
To come back to the border area, from this point of view it was, in the beginning, reasonable to everybody to replace the border void by way of a reorientation towards the lost city there.
Q: You mention the master plan. The international competition was 1987 and the Berlin Wall came down in 1989. So, this new idea of a master plan was already under way before the wall came down?
A: This exhibition was restricted to West Berlin, but there had been similar approaches in many parts of Europe and also in East Berlin… The planners in West Berlin in the 1980s and then in East Berlin, they started to imagine that in a very distant future these approaches could be combined… At that time all famous architects from the Western world, the traditionalists and also the avant gardes finished their first real projects.
Q: In recent years many Berliners have regretted not preserving more of the Wall. What was the mindset that brought this about?
A: In the beginning the result was everybody wanted to make the wall disappear and also the remnants of the border zone. There were two walls — one wall in West Berlin, the official wall, and a second wall to prevent East Berliners from getting close to it and having the opportunity to cross the wall. Everybody wanted to see this disappear entirely and to forget this very harmful urban structure for the lives of many, many people in the city. Only a few activists were convinced that it was not a good idea to make the wall disappear completely. In the beginning everybody supported the official troops from the East that had the task of making the wall disappear. Everybody had a hammer and it was a very happy process of destruction. Everybody wanted to be part of the destruction of this horrible concrete structure that was the Wall.
Q: Has the Berlin Wall left a lasting impact on the layout of the city?
A: The wall has lasting results on a mental level in Berlin — the experience of the 20th century’s continuous political disruption and series of catastrophes, and dealing with these catastrophes. Berliners are very aware of how global political events can affect their city and their everyday lives. That’s one point. Another point, from my perspective, is that we have to deal with the remnants and the heritage of two dictatorships, the National Socialists — the Nazi dictatorship — and the Communist dictatorship… So today it’s very important for us to see and to have physical remnants and to develop local strategies in a context of memory and preservation of the entire remnants of the Wall.
Q: What are some common problems with construction or city planning to develop new buildings?
A: Berlin is at the moment in another mental crisis because for the first time since the 1990s the city is experiencing a strong and privately financed economic boom. We were prepared for everything, everything, except that. After decades of political stagnation, of critical troubles, we were practicing and developing low budget projects in the city, since 1990…We don’t have a powerful national government anymore since we are a federal state. We negotiate everything on the national level and without big businesses… In a city where civil society is extremely powerful, where you can easily organize a referendum about any relevant project, it’s a big challenge to get acceptance or even support among local people and the city in general for the new necessary investment projects of housing, traffic infrastructure, new schools, social infrastructure, and the refurbishment of many, many parts of the city. People are surprised by the invasion of global business power.
Q: How do you see the phases of history being preserved in the city’s current architecture?
A: We are convinced that in the broad field between traditional design strategies and innovative design strategies, you always should try to contextualize architectural landscapes and public space designs. Of course, from decade to decade the focus is changing. In the 1980s, the concern was how to integrate your projects into the other fabric of the 19th century. In the last decade we had to focus on how to integrate new projects in the context of post-war modernism because today, for most Berliners, history starts in the time before [the] 1989 [fall of the Wall]. That changed so much.
The prefabricated industrial housing production of the socialist era, that’s already our heritage… And, of course, the heritage of the two dictatorships in general. I mentioned already the heritage of the innovative 1920s, where we discovered there was also a very normative traditionalist sideline of modernism, the heritage of the 19th century. We considered Berlin as a city that was, for at least 100 years, a laboratory of design, planning, and innovation.
The big conflicts have been reduced a little bit, but even today when we talk about what should be done in the area around the [Alexanderplatz] television tower in the heart of the city, there are three very well-established movements: One, to preserve this huge esplanade as a stage of postwar socialist modernism. One to fill it, via constructing the lost, historic, central European city center. And yet another tells us that it’s the place for complete innovation — there we could try to imagine a city of the 21st century to compare with Dubai or a Chinese city and to get rid of our local and national and European experiences.
Jessica Reincke is an aspiring reporter who recently graduated from UC Santa Barbara with a double major in English and Psychology and a certificate in Journalism.
