THE WALLS OF BERLIN

Gavin Stamp finds

architectural hope in a divided city

Berlin THE tramlines which run down the centre of the Potsdamerstrasse, once one of the busiest in the city, now disappear under a repulsive barrier of concrete, ornamented, on its western face only, by a continuous frieze of loathsome graffiti. A raised wooden platform allows the curious to see where the tramlines proceed beyond this The Lindenstrasse elevation of housing by Werner Kreis, Ulrich Schaad and Peter Schaad wall. It is a most depressing sight. Where there was once a busy road junction, the Potsdamer Platz, with its twin Greek Doric lodges by Schinkel, and, beyond, the Leipziger Platz, dominated by the splendid Wertheim department store designed by Alfred Messel, there is absolutely nothing: just a vast cleared strip to allow a clear field of fire for the border guards' machine- guns.

To anyone with a knowledge of how the capital of Germany once looked, the dam- age done by the arbitrary, absurd course of the Berlin Wall is most painful at this point. At least, a little further north, the Brandenburg Gate, that fine neo-classical gesture of an ascendant Prussia, still stands if only to be a symbol of division. Here the absurdity is heightened by the presence of the Soviet Memorial a little further west, an inferior essay in the same monumental neo-classicial style used by Speer for the Chancellery, which provided the marble of which it is made and which is flanked by Stalin tanks and guarded by Russian sol- diers, but which West Berlin policemen have to protect from close inspection by Berliners as by citizens of Stalin's former allies.

How the East German authorities expect East Berliners to accept the necessity of the Wall when its consequent lunacies are every day evident is beyond comprehen- sion. They cannot fail to be aware that Westerners can actually penetrate the Wall, without going through security, in a sort of cordon sanitaire — the S-Bahn railway viaduct — to change trains at the Friedrichstrasse station onto one of the U-Bahn lines which actually run from West to West right under East Berlin through ghostly, half-lit, closed stations: Leipziger- strasse, Postdamerplatz, Unter den Lin- den....

Great cities cannot be arbitrarily di- vided. West Berlin is still a nonsense, for, despite the efforts of architects and plan- ners, it is not a real place; it has no centre. The whole ineffaceable logic of its topogra- phy confirms that it is suburban. The Kurffirstendamm is nothing. It is as if London consisted of Oxford Street west- wards, with the public buildings of West- minster and the City cut off. For the ancient, real centre of Berlin — the Stadt- mitte — where are, or were, the great public buildings and churches, is in the East. Once West Berliners could try and forget these as relics of a lost, embarrassing past surviving in a separate, shabby pre- sent. No longer, for the domes that termin- ate inaccessible vistas to the east have been restored and their gilded lanterns and statues now glisten provocatively in the sun. History and architecture triumph over division, emphasising that Berlin can be one great city again when the obscene Wall eventually disappears, as it must.

The reason for all the restoration, all the gilding, is the 750th anniversary being celebrated with enthusiasm and at con- siderable expense on both sides of the Wall. And these celebrations cannot fail to emphasise the unity of the city. The time is clearly right for this, as, on both sides of the Wall, countless books are available on the history, topography and architecture of old Berlin: books of old photographs and, above all, books about the great architect who made Berlin into an imperial city: Schinkel. A people cannot continue to cultivate amnesia. The date 1237 is utterly remote; what really matters is the 18th and, especially, the 19th century. The era of Schinkel was a glorious period, when rising German nationalism was expressed through a precise, delicate romanticism in both architecture and painting: qualities which were less in evidence after the foundation of the Empire in 1871.

Schinkel, whose austere and yet elegant neo-classical buildings symbolise German nationalism, is revered in the East as in the West. To atone for the vile Walter Ulbricht's crime in demolishing Schinkel's School of Architecture for a Communist Party building, his great theatre has now been restored at last, along with the flanking churches in the Gendarmermarkt with their tall domes by von Gontard. Also this year, the red-brick Gothic Friedrichs- werder church has been restored as a Schinkel Museum, although the only ori- ginal work there by the master is the building itself: the will to restore seems to have been more important than finding a use. And then, at the end of the Unter den Linden, the magnificent sculptured groups on Schinkel's Schlossbrficke have at last been replaced. This is an encouraging, if rare, example of East-West co-operation, for the sculptures had been stored for safety in what became West Berlin.

There is less of Schinkel to restore in the West, but much else has been done: usually right next to the Wall as a con- tinuing advertisement for the superiority of capitalism. The old Hamburg station has been converted into a splendidly imagina- tive transport museum while the Museum of Industrial Art, now called the Martin Gropius Building after its architect, the great-uncle of Walter, has been the home of a comprehensive and painfully honest exhibition about the history of the city. `Berlin:Berlin' is quite the best exhibition I have ever seen, of an elaboration and imagination way beyond the budget or aspirations of our own Arts Council. It reveals how Berlin regards an understand- ing of the history of the city as crucial to its health and future. A whole room is made to look like a turbine hall while the double-height central hall of Gropius's lavish, Schinkelesque building is filled with a vast Expressionist structure festooned with aeroplanes, dramatic and appropriate to the Berlin of the 1920s.

One room is darkened and the visitor steps up into a partly enclosed, partly latticed structure placed over a large video screen. He looks down, and is in the nose of a bomber flying over the ruins of Berlin in 1945. The films are simply terrible: the whole vast city seems reduced to waste and desolation. It seems incredible that any- thing could have survived such destruction. Much did, of course — a tangible condem- nation of the aims and achievements of Allied bombing is the almost immaculate survival of the famous AEG factories by Behrens in the suburbs of Moabit while palaces and churches were gutted — but the policy of what Lord Cherwell char- mingly termed the `dehousing' of the Ger- mans left Berlin with a severe housing shortage. In the 1950s and 1960s this was tackled, both East and West, by the architectural methods with which we are all too familiar in Britain. But now, as part of the celebrations, West Berlin has embarked on a new experinient in building housing and in reconstructing the city which is of an interest that transcends Berlin's own concerns and which may well be the most important legacy of this 750th anniversary.

After long debate, the 'Land' of Berlin decided in 1979 to hold an Internationale Bauaustellung — Inter-nation Building Ex- hibition, or IBA — on the theme of 'the inner city as a residential area' and to be realised by the anniversary year, 1987. This was a hugely ambitious enterprise: to build or to restore some 9,000 dwellings, both public and private, principally on sites immediately south of the Tiergarten and the southern Wall of the Stadtmitte. Until 1983 the Federal Republic provided 25 per cent of the funds, since when the project has been solely financed by the Land. Since 1985, the urban renewal part of the project has been undertaken by a private company, STERN, or 'Careful Urban Re- newal Company'. It was soon clear that the initial targets were overambitious and this year only about half of a revised objective of some 6,000 dwellings has been realised, while a quarter of the projects remain on the drawing board. Even so, what can be seen now is extraordinarily impressive and very instructive.

There is nothing new about a building exhibition, that is, the construction of show flats and houses as an architectural ideal and for practical use. It is so much more sensible than demolishing exhibition build- ings when a show is over. As a demonstra- tion of urban development it was tried in London for the Festival of Britain at Lansbury in Poplar, and Berlin itself put on Interbau in 1957, for which famous international architects built the City of Tomorrow north of the Tiergarten. Inter- bau today is drab and depressing and everything that IBA is not, for the signifi- cant thing about IBA is that it is a reaction against the utopian planning of the High Modern Movement. IBA, indeed, reflects a political and architectural consciousness that the redevelopments and motorway projects of the 1960s did as much damage to Berlin as a residential city as did Allied bombs.

IBA is not only an exhibition of current architectural fashions, though it certainly is that. It is also the first significant realisa- tion of the ideas about the 'reconstruction of the city', about repairing damage and responding to historical considerations in urban areas, which have preoccupied architectural debate in the last decade as part of the general reaction to the tech- nocratic Modern Movement. Rod Hack- ney's 'community architecture' over here is about much the same thing, but in Berlin it is now the expression of political will and civic idealism and is intended to be an example to the world.

In the two principal `Neubau' develop- ment areas, which were heavily damaged' in the war — the South Tiergarten where a few of the Third Reich's foreign embassies survive, and South Freidrichstadt — there has been a return to the Berlin tenement tradition and a general retention of the existing, or, rather, the ancient street plan. Nothing is too high, streets are respected and there is a return to local urban traditions without any reproduction of the past — indeed, I would wish there had been rather greater respect for the artistic integrity of surviving old buildings. In the `Altbau' areas further east — Luisenstadt and the old SO 36 postal district facing the East across the fortified Spree — the emphasis has been upon infill and upgrad- ing and adapting existing tenement blocks — often formerly condemned — where many of Berlin's Turkish immigrants live. West Berlin's worst social problems are thought to be here, although compared with Hackney or Liverpool these areas seem most salubrious. Part of the success of IBA would seem to depend on the fact that both Germans and Turks are law- abiding and very content living in flats.

From a purely architectural point of view, IBA confirms the present eclectic, chaotic state of modern architecture. There is neo-modernism, post-modernism, something some can identify as the 'New Spirit' and every fashion except the dead spirit of English neo-palladianism. For every site, a competition was held, so that IBA can boast works by famous interna- tional names — Rossi, Grassi, Hollein, Stirling. Foreign architects, clearly identifi- able by their clothes and beards even if they are not carrying the official fat blue IBA guide, prowl the exhibition areas and in one housing estate the litter bin was full of discarded film cartons, not the usual Coca-Cola tins. As a high-class tourist attraction, Berlin can now boast what has been described as an architectural zoo.

One depressing characteristic of modern Germans is their desperate fear, induced by recent history, of seeming reactionary in any way. They are therefore easily taken in by avant-garde pseudery — indeed, West Berlin still seems to be living in the 1960s in many respects. Architecturally, this has meant giving opportunities to celebrated members of the international mutual- admiration star-lecturing circuit. The worst, of course, are the Americans. Just south of Checkpoint Charlie the New York neo-Modernist Eisenman has indulged in a pretentious and pointless exercise in recon- ciling the divergent grids of street lines and Mercator's longitude and latitude, while out at Tegel, Charles Moore (no relation), the Californian, has designed a private housing scheme whose self-indulgent post- modern classical illiteracy is as sickening as it is irrelevant to Berlin.

Much more interesting is the work of the best Europeans. At one extreme, the Berliners, Bailer & Bailer, have done a large but subtle infill scheme . whose appropriate eccentricity looks back through Expressionism to Gaudi, while, in the Lindenstrasse, Kolhoff and Ovaska place well detailed neo-Modern blocks in a satisfying rectilinear grid. One housing project by the Tiergarten was planned by Rob Krier, the Luxembourgeois and brother of Leon, who consciously looks back to the pioneer European housing schemes of the heroic Modern Movement era. Indeed, after the post-Modern over- designed gimmickry of much of IBA it is a great relief to look at the original planned Berlin estates of the late 1920s, such as that at Britz by Bruno Taut. It is not just that the unpretentious and straightforward de- tailing of Taut's buildings is so refreshing; it is also that they are in good condition, clearly work and incorporate fine commun- al gardens which contribute much to the architecture. It is one the strengths of IBA that these protected communal gardens 'defensive spaces' — have been revived.

This is the real point about IBA. It is not an exhibition of style but of planning and `process'. As Josef Paul Kleihues, director of the Neubau part of IBA, has remarked, `people have failed to realise that it was urban planning and not the individual architectural project which was the focus of our work: urban planning as a framework plan for a large number of individual tasks — for dwelling units, single houses, blocks, streets and squares and gardens and parks.' As such, it may present important lessons for Britain, both positive and negative. As admirers of IBA admit, housing schemes alone cannot guarantee the commerce and industry which the revitalisation of inner- city areas requires.

On the other hand, IBA shows what can be achieved in healthy urban renewal and improvement if the political will is there. By the use of a mixture of public money and private enterprise, life has been brought back to areas which ten years ago were as desolate as successive councils have made so much of Liverpool. Furth- ermore, not only is the general architectu- ral standard much higher than is to be found in new housing in Docklands or Liverpool, the social mix is also much more healthy. Because of a complicated system of rent subsidy and housing benefit, the same buildings can contain both subsidised and unsubsidised tenants without fraught social divisions. Also, because Berlin law requires consultation with local residents before anything is done, the former tyran- ny of planners or — still evident in modern Britain — of local authorities is impossible.

Above all, the IBA experiment should appeal to the conservative as well as to the radical mind, as it shows that an under- standing of tradition, of the organic nature of urban growth and change, of the import- ance of survivals and familiar patterns, of the failure of abstract experiments di- vorced from real human life, is absolutely essential if inner cities in Berlin as else- where are to thrive as they might and must. In its 750th anniversary year, the great, tragic but inspiring city of Berlin is provid- ing the most interesting example of urban building in the world by appreciating the overriding importance of its history. I hope that, despite its blinkered refusal to recog- nise the valuable and essential role that can be played by the public sector, our Gov- ernment might try to learn something from Berlin if it is really serious about the revitalisation of our own inner cities.