Design: Rebuilding Berlin - Yet Again

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During the last years of World War II, most buildings in central Berlin were destroyed. Postwar planners, in a kind of survivors' frenzy, pulled down much of what remained intact, finishing with bulldozers and wrecking balls what the bombs had begun. They clung to their modernist faith, bedazzled by the idea of starting anew. The war had given their ahistorical impulse -- Erase the past! -- maniacal urgency. The denuded cityscape was regarded in the '40s and '50s as the war's silver lining, a great opportunity. New buildings would be high-rise, set far apart and back from the streets. Density would be low. Technocrats would rule.

Berlin's third great architecture exhibition, the Interbau of 1957, was the high-water mark of this slightly mad, modern abstractionism, and the first such exhibition that produced a thicket of real buildings. "Planning for the City of Tomorrow" was the theme, and the results were as blandly anodyne as the motto suggests. A whole section of the city was turned into an urban- renewal proving ground, an amorphous campus where highly evolved notions of citified density were abandoned: each forgettable high-rise was an isolated Objekt plopped in sunny isolation on a lawn.

During the '60s, the Wall was meant to stop Easterners from heading West, of course, but it also severed the western half of the city from Berlin's rich historical center and deprived West Berliners of access to the East's many parks. What is more, the cutoff of laborers from East Berlin prompted West Berlin to undertake a crash program of apartment building to attract new workers from West Germany and abroad. The main result was slapdash, tired- looking Alphaville architecture, Interbau without airs.

Against this background, the singular hubris of IBA was to try to have it both ways -- a large-scale building program like those of the '20s and '50s, but with the strong concern for tradition and diversity that has predominated in the late '70s and '80s. The ambitions were grand, in true German style, but not grandiose. Indeed, Kleihues himself has written that IBA is "ultimately doomed to fall short of the aims it has set itself." Yet those aims were liberating because they were antimonumental. Berlin has lived (and nearly died) through all the various 20th century dreams of how cities ought to be. IBA, to its everlasting glory, had instead a clearheaded vision of how good cities are, and set out to restore the rules of scale and diversity that made them that way.