The World : Creating a New Architectural Vocabulary for a Democratic Berlin

Modern German cities, lamented the author of “Mein Kampf,” lack monumental architecture and potent symbols of national identity. Adolf Hitler sought to remedy this by transforming Berlin into “Ger mania,” a capital worthy of his Thousand Year Reich. Ever since he embraced Albert Speer’s overblown classicism, massive Doric columns have evoked fears of blood-spattered tyrants.

As a result, both Germanies spent four decades studiously downplaying architectural grandeur. In Bonn, Chancellor Helmut Kohl occupies squat offices humbly dubbed the Chancellor’s Bungalow. The Parliament building in the provisional Rhineland capital was designed with equal restraint. The work of German architect Guenter Behnisch, this low-rise modernist pavilion contains much transparent glass to express government openness and accessibility. A circular plenary chamber was devised to avoid any trace of hierarchy.

But the vote to move the Bundestag and 10 of the Federal Republic’s 18 ministries to Berlin by the year 2000 has rendered the building obsolete. The decision also sent Germans back to the drawing board in a public debate about “democratic architecture” and what is appropriate for a unified country of 80 million still hesitant about displaying its might on the world stage.

Redesign of Germany’s once-and-future capital is an undertaking on the order of Pierre-Charles L’Enfant’s conception for Washington, or Baron Georges-Eugene Haussmann’s transformation of Paris. Other new capitals have been erected in this century--Brasilia, New Delhi, Ankara and Canberra are some examples--but never has an endeavor of this kind been carried out with such anxiety about architectural symbolism. Because the official architecture of unified Berlin will represent the German state, authorities are grappling to find a design vocabulary that turns its back on the monumentality typical of their country’s most worrisome periods.

The perversion of the classical ideal by both Hitler and Josef Stalin calls into question facile connections between architectural style and political beliefs. Still, architecture offers important clues about how state power is exercised. Government buildings amount to billboard images of national self-understanding. Since before the Acropolis in Athens, architecture has given voice to a society’s deepest values, methods of governance and the manner in which its members relate to one another.

Berlin will not be rebuilt from scratch but gaps in its war-torn terrain contain plenty of minefields for a country acutely aware of the ideological implications of architecture and urban planning. The triumph of capitalism will take form when the no-man’s land formerly occupied by the Berlin Wall is replaced by a vast Potsdamer Platz--with office towers for Daimler-Benz and Sony. Along Unter den Linden Boulevard in the city center, there have been serious calls--and strong objections--to resurrect the palace of the Hohenzollern emperors, which was razed by the communists. A plan to demolish the defunct German Democratic Republic’s ugly glass-box Parliament has outraged many East Germans--some nostalgic for old times and others concerned that, once again, the past is being erased.

Politicians vow there will be no revival of the grandiose spirit of old Prussian ministries, Bismarckian pomposity or Speer’s megalomania. But at the same time, there is a desire for structures deemed worthy of a cosmopolitan capital.

While the splendid centers of most European capitals were ordered up by powerful leaders, Germany today is reinventing Berlin by holding scores of architectural competitions, open to architects from around the world.

Practically every architect of international stature has vied for the bonanza of public and private projects--including Renzo Piano, Peter Eisenman, Philip Johnson, Rafael Moneo, Helmut Jahn and Richard Rogers. German architects are also playing a role, but enlisting stars from abroad is one way of demonstrating openness to outside ideas.

In the architectural equivalent of a G-7 summit, the government invited proposals from the United States, Europe and Japan to turn Germany’s most famous building, the century-old Reichstag--torched in a 1933 fire that Hitler used as a pretext to impose emergency rule--into the new seat of the Bundestag. Sir Norman Foster of Britain won with a plan to retrofit the scarred hulk with a forward-looking legislative chamber in his high-tech machine aesthetic.

“There is all the inherent symbolism of what that building stands for and the need to make manifest from the outside that something new and different has happened inside,” Foster says of the neo-Renaissance building. Glass elevators, glass roofing and translucent floors will flood the setting of Germany’s darkest hours with light. Construction is to begin next year--after the artist Christo wraps the Reichstag in 1 million square feet of silver fabric to herald the capital’s epochal transformation.

Shunted off to the side of the capital under both kaiser and Fuehrer, the Reichstag has been accorded pride of place in the master plan for the future nexus of German power--a 150-acre site known as the Spreebogen. In addition to Foster’s refurbished Parliament and nearby offices for the 650 deputies, this area will house the new headquarters of the first chancellor since Hitler to govern from Berlin. More than 830 entries from 48 countries were submitted in the Spreebogen competition, judged by German politicians and foreign architects including Richard Meier and Karen Van Lengen--both responsible for major construction projects in Germany.

The past weighed heavily on the selection process, particularly since the Spreebogen was where Speer envisioned a vast north-south axis with a soaring Volkshalle to accommodate 180,000 people. In another effort to banish the past, only schemes with an east-west axis were seriously considered.

Most politicians gravitated toward a low-key, decentralized design recalling Bonn’s muted arrangement because they were “nervous about taking a stand” on a clear embodiment of state power, lest the wrong signals be sent, according to Van Lengen. “They wanted to say, ‘We’re just this little country in Europe,’ ” she says. “They’re very sensitive about it because they know the world is watching them.” The foreign architects preferred a more cohesive solution and swayed deliberations by the jury, whose official members included Bundestag President Rita Suessmuth, Kohl’s chief of staff Friedrich Bohl and Berlin Mayor Eberhard Diepgen.

After two weeks of intense debate, the jury settled on a design by Berliner Axel Schultes, pronouncing it “a bold representation of the democratic state.” Schultes knits together the long-divided city with a mall-like scheme, punctuated by open courts and gardens. His master plan involves no designs of individual buildings, leaving these to be determined by subsequent competitions.

Berlin will not be rebuilt in a day. With the transfer from Bonn estimated to cost $11 billion, construction of the new government seat could drag on for decades. Official German architecture will surely mutate in that time, to reflect fluctuations in the national self-image.

The history of modernism--Berlin was one of its flash points before the Nazis sent the Bauhaus design school into exile--has shown the delusion of putting too much stock in design as an influence of political behavior. Nonetheless, state buildings are key symbols of the national consciousness. How Germany meets the challenge of architectural representation merits attention from all democratic societies that aspire to give concrete form to their highest ideals.*