Design: Rebuilding Berlin - Yet Again

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The 20th century has been crueler to Berlin than to most any other major city in the world. In architecture as in politics, Berlin is a birthplace of modernism -- the kind of avenging romantic modernism that was determined to demolish the past and rebuild the future from scratch. And so again and again for a half-century after World War I, the city was razed wholesale for the sake of ferocious social ideas: first, the Utopian housing tracts of the 1920s; then the Nazis' megalomaniacal neoclassicism in the '30s; the devastating Allied bombing raids in the '40s; the redoubled, misguided urban renewal of the '50s and '60s; and, of course, the Communists' lobotomizing Wall. Berlin has been a city tragically suited to the before-and-after aerial view.

Now it seems that West Berlin, anyway, has come to its common senses. The city has found a means of regenerating the premodern urban-design traditions by which it grew, while at the same time creating the most ambitious showcase of world architecture in this generation. The occasion, fittingly, is this year's celebration of the 750th anniversary of the city's founding. From now through the autumn, hundreds of thousands of Berliners and visitors are to attend concerts, gallery exhibits, symposiums and street festivities commemorating Berlin's birthday.

Indeed, when President Reagan visits West Berlin this week, he may get a passing glimpse of the most extraordinary of all these observances: the building program undertaken by the International Building Exhibition (IBA), which was legislated into existence eight years ago by West Berlin's government. IBA has developed more than 100 sites around the city, mostly in the dead zones and odd holes left in the urban fabric near the Wall and along the Landwehr Canal, which runs through the center of the city. On these sites, private developers, with government-subsidized loans, have now finished the majority of some $1.5 billion worth of new buildings, mostly apartments for about 35,000 middle- and working-class tenants.

The project's virtuous social agenda would be unremarkable without its world-class aesthetic aspirations. More than 200 architects from 15 countries entered IBA's invitational design competitions, and the winners constitute a sort of international Who's Who. West Berlin has or will soon have new IBA buildings by O.M. Ungers (West Germany), Hans Hollein (Austria), Rob Krier (Luxembourg), Mario Botta (Switzerland), Aldo Rossi (Italy), Oriol Bohigas (Spain), Rem Koolhaas (the Netherlands), James Stirling (Britain), Arata Isozaki (Japan) and, from the U.S., Charles Moore, Robert A.M. Stern, Stanley Tigerman, Peter Eisenman and John Hejduk. A museum show tied to IBA, "750 Years of Architecture and Urban Design," is currently on view in West Berlin at Mies van der Rohe's last great building, the National Gallery.