Design: Rebuilding Berlin - Yet Again

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Just as Moore, sunny and prolific, is easy to like, Eisenman, prickly and abstruse, all but curries the disfavor of his peers and the public. His building overlooking Checkpoint Charlie is, but for its adherence to the local height standard, willfully anticontextual, an asymmetrical collage of gray boxes among beaux artsy commercial buildings. Like every Eisenman work, it is a hermetic abstraction, a portentous recapitulation of De Stijl that comes off less as homage than as labored parody. As an object, it is pleasing (and familiar) enough: blue and white grid overlaid on red grid overlaid on grids of white window mullions, with the building's axis cocked just enough to suggest that something important and subtle is going on. What the architect intends, perhaps, to be the structural equivalent of a Borges story is instead an overgrown Rubik's Cube. Eisenman has built another of his trademark brainteasers here, and proximity to the Wall is supposed to invest it with special significance.

There are dozens of other intriguing IBA buildings. The water plant at Tegel by Gustav Peichl is a gorgeous, articulate piece of industrial architecture in the early 20th century German tradition. Just west of Mies' National Gallery, James Stirling's social-science center, a compound consisting of three pieces (the largest a low-rise circular building, reminiscent of Stirling's museum in Stuttgart), will be finished later this year. Frei Otto's Okohaus is a winsome sop to the Greens, West Germany's radical party of pacifists and ecological zealots. In the middle of West Berlin, within a bare-bones superstructure to be built by the government, back-to-the-land devotees will put up their own huts and grow their own vegetables.

For IBA, deciding which architects would be invited to compete was, not surprisingly, a highly political process. "We didn't want big-scale '70s architects like ((Helmut)) Jahn," says Gudrun Hamacher, an architect who is a member of IBA. "They didn't fit. We wanted architects." In fact, IBA got just about everyone it wanted to participate (notable exceptions: Robert Venturi, the prototypical American postmodernist, and the high-tech Britons Richard Rogers and Norman Foster). Local protectionist sentiment ran high, but as it turned out -- indeed, as it was probably intended from the beginning -- foreigners won the competitions disproportionately. "The pressure from Berlin architects was very hard," says Hamacher, but the influx of renowned Auslander, she says, "has been a fine influence on Berlin architecture. Berlin is isolated, like an island, and so this outside influence has been very good."

Berlin's social visionaries have not often been open to such influence. The city held its first two modern architecture expositions when Mies was still a Berlin architect, in 1910 and 1931, but those were mere gallery exhibits of plans and models -- vast schemes, many of them, but safely confined to the drawing boards. It took National Socialism to carry out the demolition and reconstruction of Berlin neighborhoods. The Nazis may have hated the stylistic innovations of the architectural avant-garde, but when putsch came to shove, Albert Speer and Walter Gropius shared a contempt for the dense, accreted idiosyncrasies of the old-fashioned inner city. It was the modern duty to impose a new orderliness -- an abstract, machine-made order before 1932; a brutish, pseudo-ancient order after.