architectureinberlin

Annoyingly busy lately, hence the continuing lack of blogging, but essential to mention the next Stammtisch, which once again will be at Kim – Brunnenstrasse 10, Berlin 10119 – from 8pm. There’s no sign saying ‘Kim’ (to be extra cool) and it just opens for us on the night, so don’t be afraid to come on in even if it looks more like a meeting than a social gathering.

Everybody and anybody welcome, to have a beer and chat about architecture, urbanism and other such related Berlin things.  Generally in english, but german often breaks out in small pockets.

I’ve also set up a Facebook group for it, if you’re familiar with such things, called Berlin Architecture Circle – possibly not a great name, but I found a really good picture for it so couldn’t resist…

Hope you can make it,

Jim

H – 01577 682 7829

A second attempt at having meetup no.4.

As ever, it’s just a few drinks and a chat, open to anyone who fancies talking about architecture and urban things in Berlin (and elsewhere), so do join us if you’re around.

This one will be on Wedensday, 16th September at 8pm, upstairs at Sankt Oberholz:

http://www.qype.com/place/492-Sankt-Oberholz-Berlin

I’ll put a sign on the table, saying ‘Jim’ or ‘Architektur’ or something like that.

Useful to know if you’re coming, so I have an idea of numbers – jim_hudson33@yahoo.co.uk.

Bis Mittwoch!

We’ve already established how bad I am at listing architecture-related events.  But by way of further proof: I failed to mention yesterday’s Lange Nacht der Museen (long night of the museums) or last weekend’s Tag der offenen Tür der Bundesregierung (the ‘Open House’ day for federal government buildings).

So let me put this right by mentioning the forthcoming Tag des offenen Denkmals, on the 13th September.  Literally the ‘day of open monuments’, it covers more than monuments, and more than one day (a great number of the buildings are open on the 12th as well.

Struggle through the typically poor website (this is Germany, so no clues given, such as images for the buildings listed) but if you can pick up the free catalogue around the city, it’s much more readable.  Especially on the bus.

Essentially, the ‘day’ seems to cover just about every building in Berlin of interest that isn’t new – so there are plenty of modern classics in there.  Most have guided tours (although generally in german).

Far too many buildings to mention here, but they include the Haus des Lehrers:

the Bauhaus Archiv, the Hansaviertel, multiple buildings on, and tours of, Karl-Marx-Allee, Scharoun’s Staatsbibliothek, Mendelsohn’s Metallarbeiter building:

…. the Le Corbusier Haus, churches, bunkers, factories, private houses and all of the major, and the recently UNESCO listed modernist estates around the city.

I’m going to have a lie down now, as have become too excited.

I know, I know…  I haven’t blogged for ages.  Excuses?  Loads, including the fact that I’ve been writing some actual paid-for writing, which I’ll mention again (when October’s edition of Blueprint magazine come out).   And I’ve been in London, where I’m always instantly thrown by all the traffic and people, and remain in shock for about a week on my return to lovely calm, quiet Berlin.

Anyway, what better way to return to blogging with some ever-untopical IBA buildings.  Some of which I’ve written about before, but I was just passing these on the way along Kochstrasse*, coming back from the Modell Bauhaus exhibition at the Gropius Bau (previously recommended).  So a bit of a ramble.

*at least one end of which has recently been renamed, confusingly, but I can’t remember what to.

A few months back I found myself sitting next to David Mackay, of MBM architects (a friend was designing his autobiography).  He was saying that the design of one of his  Kochstrasse buildings – this one in fact:

…was turned 90 degrees at a late stage, so that if need be, allied tanks could bypass Checkpoint Charlie and head up an alleyway between his building and Rem’s next door.  Not sure how this would have worked; it seems terribly narrow. And tanks are quite wide.

While I was musing on this, I took some photies of the back of the Koolhaas/OMA building.  I like the backs of buildings.  Especially the place they keep the bins – it sometimes tells you more about the architecture than looking at the front/insides does.  It’s an early one for Mr Koolhaas, but has some tell-tale details:

Note the sloping transome bar, obscured by some cabinets:

Will do the rest of this in parts, so that I can seperately tag them, as I’m anally retentive like that.  Back shortly.

Time has flown, and I’ve completely forgotten to announce the next get-together, which is this tuesday!

It’s just a few drinks and a chat, open to anyone who fancies talking about architecture and urban things in Berlin (and elsewhere), so do join us if you’re around.

Tuesday,  28th July, 8pm, upstairs at Sankt Oberholz:

http://www.qype.com/place/492-Sankt-Oberholz-Berlin

I’ll put a sign on the table, saying ‘Jim’ or ‘Architektur’ or something like that.

Useful to know if you’re coming, so I have an idea of numbers – jim_hudson33@yahoo.co.uk.

See you tuesday!

One is an iconic concert hall and cultural venue, a piece of seminal, forward-looking ’50s architecture set on the south bank of the river in a capital city recently devastated by war.

The other, by contrast, is an iconic concert hall and cultural venue, a piece of seminal, forward-looking ’50s architecture set on the south bank of the river in a capital city recently devastated by war.

I’m writing this post because every time I visit the Haus der Kulturen der Welt, (House of World Cultures) in Berlin’s Tiergarten, I’m struck by how completely different, and by how very similar it is to London’s Royal Festival Hall.

Friday night was a busy one at the HKW (as I’ll call it from now on) – a double bill of Horace Andy and Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry / Adrian Sherwood.  A shame really that we didn’t get in (just went on the spur of the moment for standby tickets), although curiously one of the best evenings I’ve ever spent failing to get in somewhere.  A spectacular summer storm passed over, momentarily quenching the pleasant smell of pot smoke wafting up from the garden area forming part of the gig venue.

Anyway, the HKW was built as part of the 1957 Interbau, which also included the Hansaviertel.  The building was designed by american architect Hugh Stubbins and was a gift from the US – a built embodiment of the Marshall plan and America’s support for postwar european reconstruction. The main concert hall is effectively an independent box suspended from the spectacular arch which spans the whole of the building; in fact it’s the central idea of the design.

The RFH (as it’s often known) is a little older, built in 1951 as part of the Festival of Britain, on a tight budget in a bankrupt Britain still on rationing. The design is by Leslie Martin, Peter Moro, and Robert Matthews (founder of  RMJM) from the London County Council’s Architects’ Department.  The main concert hall is essentially an independent box sitting within the form of the larger building, which is only apparent at roof level when viewed from outside.

Images above by Jamie Barras (an impressive collection of London buildings on Flickr)

Images below by Mark TJ:

I rather like both buildings, to be frank, but I feel a little bit sorry for the HKW on occasions – generally the occasions when there just isn’t anyone much there.  The problem is twofold. Firstly, the HKW is in the middle of nowhere – handy if you’re Angela Merkel, less handy if you live somewhere in the rest of Berlin (of course due to Berlin’s recent history and ‘unusual planning issues’, the centre of Berlin is the middle of nowhere, but that’s a discussion for another day).  The second problem is that the Haupstadt is just not a very populous place as big cities go.  It often feels to me like a city built for a much bigger population, who promptly left, and were replaced by a smaller group of partygoers who’ve been squatting ever since and can’t believe their luck.

These days you can hardly move on London’s South Bank; a single stretch of river bank now plays host to a whole swathe of cultural buildings, venues, restaurants and the like.  So much so, that even north londoners make the fifty metre journey across the Thames to visit.  (They don’t go any further than the South Bank of course – you can’t get a cab back).

The HKW on an average sunday, on the other hand, rather reminds me of the RFH on a sunday in the late 1970s, when it too seemed a slightly lonely place, plagued at the time by my own personal demon of not having done my school homework for school the next day).

Both are beautifully carried through, full of that attention to detail, although ironically much of the RFH was not built to last, and the building in its current external form was reworked a few years later with a significantly different, stone-clad design.  In truth, as I’m writing this, I’m thinking that actually the detailing of the RFH beats the HKW hands down.

The RFH is also a bigger building, feeling more generous with its space, which I guess is a little unfair to the HKW; presumably both were built to the size required by the brief.  But the HKW seems a little enslaved by its structural engineering – that great big arch with the curved hall beneath are the big idea.  The rest of the building is relatively unremarkable by comparison.

So it’s the Royal Festival Hall, isn’t it?  Perhaps if the HKW had been by a german architect, more like say, Hans Scharoun’s Philharmonie not far away at the Kulturforum.  D’oh!  Actually this would have been a much better comparison wouldn’t it?  I love the Philarmonie, including its detailing.  Perhaps this has actually just been an exercise in homesickness, realising what I really miss about London – not the traffic, the cost, the 2 hour journeys to get from A to B, but maybe, on some days, the crowds; the sheer weight of people in a city bursting at the seams.

Ooh, just one other thing.  If (like me) you’d been generally uninspired by the various block-like government buildings around the Reichstag, try cycling (slightly drunkenly) past them late at night.  They look much better.

Right, off to photograph the Philharmonie…

After the success of the last meetup (small but perfectly formed), I thought I’d do another one.  So if you fancy joining us to discuss architecture, urbanism, or anything else (there was much talk about cake baking last time) do join us:

Wednesday 1st July, 8pm, upstairs at Sankt Oberholz:

http://www.qype.com/place/492-Sankt-Oberholz-Berlin

I’ll be easy to spot – I’m the one without the Mac Powerbook.

Useful to know if you’re coming, so I have an idea of numbers – jim_hudson33@yahoo.co.uk.

I think we’ve already established that they’re much better at keeping up to date with archi-related events and such like over at Baustelle, but undaunted, I note that this coming weekend is something of an architecture fest: as part of the nationwide Tag der Architektur, Berlin will be having not only a Tag der Architektur but a Tag der offenen Architekturbüros as well.

So essentially you can spend your entire weekend being extremely nosey in architects’ offices, and maybe even looking at some buildings.

It’s annoying that on the very same weekend is 48 Stunden Neukölln, which includes an exhibition called reuterland , which I’d like to see.

It’s also a friend’s birthday BBQ on sunday.  But you don’t have to go to that.

(image is sc11 Baugruppenprojekt by zanderroth architekten)

Last winter I visited Mittelbau-Dora, one of the concentration camps which used slave labour to build V2 rockets late in the war.   It left a strong impression: a bleak snowscape with occasional fragments of the camp’s buildings and fences, and the factory tunnels where inmates were worked to death.  What I found most shocking was not the existence of the Dora camp itself, but the museum’s exhibit on the many smaller sub-camps which existed across the region.  Many of these camps were based in towns and villages, where they provided slave labour to local businesses.  It’s easier for us to think of the camps as somewhere else, away from the public eye – ‘it wasn’t our fault, we didn’t know about it’.  Records of these ‘publicly integrated’ arrangements give the lie to such an argument.

The introduction to Traces of Terror: Sites of Nazi Tyranny in Berlin makes the point that museums alone are unable to keep the public’s memory of the Holocaust alive, and that knowledge of sites and buildings where atrocities were planned or carried out is an essential part of our historical understanding.  Unlike  Holocaust museums in the US and elsewhere, such museums in Germany and Austria “… would be stylish counterfeits to lessen the burden of being confronted with the authentic.  Imagine a flash, post-modern museum in Berlin compared to Ravensbrück, where reality can be experienced and comprehended.”

It’s a point that I agree with; even though Berlin is severely lacking in good recent architecture, and Peter Zumthor is a very good architect (and not at all ‘flash’) I do think that, had his building been completed at the Topography of Terror site, it would have become as much a mecca for architecture students, than a place for marking perpetrators.

This book is not a record of building’s erected around Berlin by the Nazi regime, but rather a thoughtful analysis of key sites. Some of these, such as Ernst Sagebiel’s Reich Air Ministry, we know as architectural symbols of the Third Reich; stripped neoclassicism, imposing, bombastic.  Other locations played a more complex role, for instance the  SA-Stormlokale (’Storm Locals’, I guess) – bars and restaurants which served as bases for the SA (the paramilitary group which provided the ‘muscle’ for the Nazi’s rise to power).  The basements were often used as prisons and torture rooms, and they also became ad hoc police stations when the SA became officially sanctioned from 1933.

It’s also a sad reminder of how Berlin paid the price for the crimes of the Nazis.  Many of the buildings featured are shown in pre and postwar condition, as well as later, during the cold war and beyond.  The photographic cycle of baroque edifice / bombed out shell / rainswept parking lot / bland Commerzbank office is a salutory lesson.

To praise this book is not, of course, to criticise such guides as Matthias Donath’s Architektur in Berlin 1933-1945, (there’s a fuller version in german) which covers key buildings erected during the regime – I’ve found this an essential in trying to understand the Nazi’s architectural legacy, rather than just as a trainspotter’s guide.  But Traces of Terror, with its careful commentary on each site and building, slowly builds the argument that I clumsily attempted at the beginning of this post; that to understand how these atrocities occurred, it’s important to realise that they took place in public view: at Westhafen S-Bahn station, where hundreds of thousands were deported to ghettos and death camps in the east, or at a concentration camp, not hidden away in woodland, but in a brewery in the middle of Oranienberg.

Traces of Terror – Sites of Nazi Tyranny in Berlin
Spuren des Terrors – Stätten nationalsozialistischer Gewaltherrschaft in Berlin

with a foreward by Paul Spiegel

Amazon link

English / german, Verlagshaus Braun, 2002

William at Baustelle mentioned to me last night that the Deutsches Historisches Museum is running a series of architectural film screenings: ‘Kunst des Dokuments – Architektur‘.  It’s every thursday – tonight’s is Norman Foster’s Gherkin.

Worth going along not least to see the Zeughaus Kino itself, a ’superb example of ‘60s socialist functionalism’.

I would have flagged this up previously, but the DHM bombards me with such a huge number of press emails that I got behind with reading them, so that they piled up at the rate of several a day and I lost track.  Sorry!