The unification of a capital
- Europe's biggest concentration of contemporary architecture.
- The list of architects virtually comprises a roll-call of the world's leading architectural practices.
- Access to private places, and time for some of the standard sights.
Perhaps the most joyous year of the twentieth century, 1989 culminated in the breaching of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the East German state. With the headlong rush towards monetary and political unification which followed, there arose the question of where to locate the capital of the new Germany.
Should it remain in Bonn, ‘a small town in Germany’, provisional base of the western Federal Republic (and where a proper parliament house was just beginning to be built), or should it be moved back to Berlin, with all the complex historical resonances which that entailed (including, for citizens of the former GDR, the fact that Berlin was already a capital). By a narrow majority in June 1991 Berlin won the vote.
Almost immediately the city became the biggest building site in Europe, the skies darkened by cranes like scavengers cleansing the site of dead ideologies and tragic memories, and the ground excavated with deep pits as if the very subsoil was tainted and in need of renewal. Not only was the government outfitting the city with all the necessaria of a political capital, but the infrastructure needed radical surgery, two halves which had developed completely separately over half a century needed to be knitted together, heavyweight companies were moving their headquarters here and the great museums and cultural institutions were being renewed. In their wake the camp followers of urban renewal poured in – speculative office buildings, apartments for every depth of pocket, shops, cinemas, sporting facilities.
The economic stagnation of the mid-1990s should form part of the story, but so deep are the roots of prosperity that, to the visiting Brit, recession in Germany looks like boom time back home. Some economy measures were imposed by the government: some of the grander schemes were trimmed, and a requirement to rehabilitate existing buildings as far as possible was instituted, which in retrospect resulted in an even more stimulating built environment.
There are many layers to the fascinating story of Berlin’s new architecture, and one of them is this: while its quantity is amazing and the speed of its construction astonishing, the quality on the whole is staggeringly high – three characteristics not usually found in the same sentence. The traditional long-term thinking of German enterprise helps, resulting in sound workmanship and good materials. To this is happily allied a widespread interest in visual culture and a general enthusiasm for the modern. Every Berlin taxi driver seems able to discuss the merits of the more prominent buildings.
And then there is the extraordinary internationalism of present-day Germany. Symbolism can be teased out of every block of masonry in the new Berlin, and so a rejection of the nationalism of the past, whether conscious or not, probably plays a role. But the fact is that many leading architects from countries around the world have contributed magnificently to the new Berlin. In the context of this paragraph, it would be tastelessly ironic to trumpet the fact that the nation which has spawned more of the foreign architects than any other is Great Britain, but it will undeniably give extra interest to the British participants on this tour.