Design: Rebuilding Berlin - Yet Again

• Share

(3 of 5)

Most of the IBA buildings were designed between 1979 and 1984, at the peak of international postmodern fervor. Rather than returning to neoclassical forms, as postmodernism has generally meant in the U.S., the IBA architects have tended to borrow from the early 20th century avant-garde. Aside from Kleihues, Rob Krier is probably more responsible for the results than any other architect. He was master planner for three important IBA blocks. While none of Krier's IBA architecture is great, all of it is good. His best is the main building (of nine) of a rather formal housing estate near the Tiergarten, West Berlin's big central park. The main facade, an outthrust white shield, could be the refurbished fragment of an ancient Roman circus. But in pure postmodern fashion, the metaphors are freely mixed: facing the long central lawn on the interior is a handsome pair of neo-medieval towers in red brick, and windows copied, it seems, from a 19th century factory.

Behind the Krier shield sit two rows of four buildings of modest size: five stories, five apartments to a floor. The most extravagant is by Hans Hollein, a ((pink and blue and yellow and red)) box with broad, flaring eaves and lights embedded in column capitals -- the largest Memphis-style object ever constructed. The best of the lot is Aldo Rossi's low-key construction of red brick and yellow block. The colored bands recall Schinkel, the octagonal clerestory recalls Rossi's own floating Venetian theater, and the exposed I- beam "lintels" over the windows remind us that architecture is about construction as well as decoration.

IBA's two most controversial projects are by Americans, mannerists at extreme opposite ends of the architectural spectrum. One is a sprawling apartment complex in a suburban resort town by Charles Moore (with his partner John Ruble), the other a cramped commercial and residential building overlooking the Wall by Peter Eisenman. The Moore buildings at Tegel are, as his critics have charged, Disney-like, a mite overeager to please. But Tegel is a resort town; the complex was meant to be a playful place, and it is easy to play along with Moore's California-cum-German-romantic palette (pastel peach and blue), the dormers and gables that crop up without warning, the classicized little plazas and passageways. Two other romantic American architects, Robert Stern and Stanley Tigerman, have designed wildly baroque villas to be built next door.