Design: Rebuilding Berlin - Yet Again

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It is a complicated creative task to design any building at all for Berlin. The burden of the past is heavy and confused. Powerful stylistic traditions compete and clash -- baroque vs. volkisch, modernist vs. neoclassical, Karl Friedrich Schinkel vs. Walter Gropius -- and each is politicized, freighted with connotation. Berlin is an ambivalent city, a city of uneasy architectural taboos. Albert Speer's bombastic Nazi splendors must be condemned no matter how handsome they sometimes seem during this era of classical revival. The Wall, horrid as ever, has nevertheless become the great built symbol of the city, a folk-brutalist icon. The city that tore itself apart under the Nazis and again under the progressives is now unbudgingly preservationist.

IBA stepped sensibly into this anxious muddle, instructing its architects to "pick up historical traces, respect the traditional layout and conserve the existing buildings." Somehow blending in with the surrounding neighborhood is an obligation of all new buildings these days, the motherhood- and-apple-pie issue of contemporary architecture. But as a practical matter, it is not so easy to be contextual in Berlin, where the old patterns of streets and blocks and squares -- the context -- have been erased or ignored. Thus IBA's first task was to unearth the archaeology of the modern city, to find and record the building history of each city block. In traumatized, amnesiac Berlin, the civic memory had to be re-created. The new IBA construction would take its lead from the historical residue.

Buildings in Berlin traditionally rose no higher than six stories, and the IBA buildings have reestablished that reasonable city standard. Long facades are visually broken up into sections of congenial town-house proportions with clustered windows, projecting bays and, in some cases, peaked or mock-baroque gingerbread-house roof lines. IBA has revived other Berlin housing traditions: buildings come right up to the sidewalk; most of the new complexes are arranged around courtyards; and, despite the modest budgets, large public hallways are the rule.

But the riskiest and most innovative principle, and one insisted upon by Josef Kleihues, an IBA director, was the guarantee of diversity among the buildings on a single block. In general, one architect would devise a schematic master plan for each block or neighborhood, and several different architects would execute the buildings. Coherence was ensured by the master plans (and the overall IBA guidelines governing density, size and layout); architects of disparate sensibilities working independently provided the physical quirks and dissonances that enliven cities. It is encouraging and slightly incredible that a big-city government, with its bureaucratic instinct for conformity, could accommodate such an unpredictable kind of patchwork pluralism.