architectureinberlin

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…

Verlagshaus Braun, 2008.  Edited by the Deutscher Werkbund Berlin.

Majority of text in german and english, with some of the english texts slightly summarised. Short building descriptions are in german only, but fairly easy to work out.

Amazon link

Bruno Taut is accepted as one of the founding fathers of modern architecture, although his work was apparently mocked at the time by the press as an architect of ‘little people’s happiness’, which in retrospect seems an odd sort of insult.  He’s also one of those, like Poelzig or Mies, whose designs spanned the pre-modern to the modern; it often seems to be the case with figures such as these that their early work is left out of the historical account, as it doesn’t fit with the revolutionary narrative of modernism.

Not so here – the book is both a good introduction to Taut’s work, and a well-researched and thorough guide to all of his buildings in Berlin, from 1908 onwards, both destroyed and extant.  Each project is set out with example floor plans, contemporary and original images, site location plans and text.  But it’s the chronological ordering that’s so effective, as you can clearly see the development of Taut’s ideas from some relatively undistinguished buildings, through to the colourful large scale estates mentioned in the title.  This also gives the lie to the ‘hermetically sealed’ historical view of modernism; rather, the architecture develops gradually through what we know as ‘modernist’ design, and you have the feeling that creating a sleek white minimal look was in any case not Taut’s overriding aim.  In fact the colour schemes of some of the estates, generally recently restored to their former glory and reproduced in the book, could be described politely as ‘exuberant’.

There are some good essays on Taut’s membership of the Deutscher Werkbund (who are responsible for the publication of the book itself), his work with light and colour, and the preservation of his work in later years.  Incredibly, Taut built over 10,000 apartments in Berlin.  Of Berlin’s six housing estates recently awarded UNESCO World Heritage Status, four are by Taut; the book includes an essay on the status and preservation of Taut’s legacy.  Since you ask, the four estates are:

- Tuschkastensiedlung Falkenberg, 1913-16
- Wohnstadt Carl Legien in Prenzlauer Berg, 1928-30
- Hufeisensiedlung Britz, 1925-30 (the ‘Horseshoe’ estate)
- Siedlung Schillerpark im Wedding

What was also fascinating was to discover that two of Taut’s earliest buildings are in my immediate neighbourhood, both located on what I had considered to be the architecturally barren street of Kottbusser Damm, south of the canal.  Clearly I don’t look up enough when walking down the street (I generally watch the pavement in Neukoln/Kreuzberg, where dog owners take a laissez-faire attitude).

The first is no. 2-3, a block which remained a postwar ruin until the 1980s, until it was rebuilt, bizarrely, by Inken and Hinrich Baller, who are themselves no strangers to this blog.  Originally, the block included a cinema in the lower storeys.

It’s all Taut at the front:

but Baller at the back:

Just down the road is a quite different building, but also 1909.  What strikes you most is the Arts & Crafts styling, which was never completely lost to Taut in his later work:

The book is packed with the level of detail that I like.  I was interested to note that the Haus des Deutschen Verkehrsbundes (the state traffic office) on Engeldamm, originally had its limestone facing painted over in a dark colour, which seems a little contrary to logic, but does emphasize the importance of colour in Taut’s architecture:

(Image by Julien Valle, who has also photographed brother Max Taut’s building just south on Oranienplatz. In fact he’s photographed lots of things that I meant to get round to but haven’t – well worth a look. Anyway, back at the book review…)

In some ways the sub-title ‘Master of Colourful Architecture…’ is a little misleading (as well as being slightly clunky in english) despite the inclusion of an essay on the enormous importance of colour in Taut’s work.  I make this not really as a criticism though, because what comes through most from the book is Taut’s dedication to better living conditions for ordinary people, achieved through design, and the strong influence of the english Garden City movement; more Letchworth and lawns, than Mies and modernism.

Just a very short post, to celebrate the end of my annoyance at not being able to find this site. I came across it a while back, forgot to bookmark it, and haven’t been able to find it since.

Its theme is endangered post-war architecture in Berlin – some beauties and some real beasts are featured. But don’t waste time listening to me – hurry off to www.restmodern.de (there’s a version in English too).

Also see other post for Mendelsohn’s Einsteinturm in Potsdam, just outside Berlin.

Today we’re pretty used to the idea of putting modernist (usually high-tech) elements into buildings from previous eras; Foster at the Reichstag, I M Pei at the Deutsche Historical Museum, to name a couple of Berlin examples.

But in the early twentieth century the idea would have been almost unheard of. So how groundbreaking must Mendelsohn’s Mossehaus have been?

The original building of 1900-1903, by Cremer & Wolffenstein, was a neoclassical sandstone affair, the corner of which was badly damaged by post first world war rioting (it must have been pretty extreme rioting, but such were the conditions in Germany at the time, I guess).

Mendelsohn retained most of the building’s main facades, but completely rebuilt the corner, and added two/three additional stories, in a totally original, streamlined expressionist style.

What was also radical for its time was the focus on the corner of the building, seen by Mendelsohn as the focus of movement; at the junction of streets, as opposed to a ’static’ entrance in the middle of a facade.

Oddly, section of ‘original’ facade on the southern elevation which should date from 1903 has been replaced by a recent, bland, office curtain wall. Perhaps this part was lost in WWII and the whole elevation rebuilt, including the Mendelsohn additional stories?

Elevation on Jerusalemer Strasse

Elevation on Schützenstrasse – more recent, but why?

Following the Einsteinturm, Mendelsohn became hugely successful, running Germany’s largest architectural practice between the wars, with commissions including department stores in Stuttgart, Chemnitz and Berlin (Potsdamer Platz, demolished after the war).

It’s interesting that the Mossehaus was Mendelsohn’s first major commission following the Einsteinturm, and the expressionist ideas are evident. But by the time he was forced to flee Germany in the 1930s (he was a Jewish, successful, modernist architect, so not exactly popular with the Third Reich) he was producing buildings that we would recognise as entirely modernist. The Metal Workers Union building (Industriegewerkschaft Metall), at the southern end of Alte Jakobstrasse, is one of these.

Unlike the Mossehaus, which is currently occupied by Total, who don’t like you even peering into the entrance area, reception staff at the Union building allow access to the entrance area and main staircase (if you ask nicely).

Annoyingly, the staircase was completely scaffolded when I went; I’ll drop in again soon and replace the images with better ones.

The original commission was for a substantially larger building over two blocks, linked by a bridge; someone at Manchester Uni has done a quite cool video for the building.

The building has just been completely refurbished, and is classic ‘streamline moderne’ – long, long brass handrails, strip windows and expanses of white render. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the lobby bears a striking resemblance to the interiors of his pavilion at Bexhill-on-Sea – Mendelsohn’s only major building in England. The spiral staircase, with its sweeping handrails and vertical lighting system suspended throughout its height, seems near identical.

Bexhill

And then Berlin…

Rear elevation, which fittingly enough looks out over Libeskind’s Jewish museum directly to the north.

Alte Jakobstrasse elevation. An unsettling image on show in the atrium shows the Union symbol replaced with a swastika in the same circle design during the 1930s.

Oddly, the atrium information boards also describe Mendelsohn’s Bexhill pavilion erroneously as being in Bexley (a part of south east London, in which it definitely isn’t).

I wouldn’t want anyone to think that my recent post on the 87 IBA was a full-blown defence of postmodernism; it was more about the merits of careful urban planning.  I only mention this because I was walking around Aldo Rossi’s Quartier Schützenstrasse in central Berlin the other day, and was having fairly negative views on po-mo as a style.

It was built in the mid 90s, following the ideas of critical reconstruction developed from the IBA, and is instantly recognisable by its multicoloured facades; it seems at first glance to be a series of different buildings on the same block, each a different (mostly primary) colour.

Despite the interesting layout of its internal courtyards, and the inclusion of one pre-existing building, its basically one big speculative development with the potential to remove internal partitions for continuous office space.

The splitting of the facades into apparently separate buildings is therefore entirely false, and deliberately underlined by the inclusion of a copy of the Renaissance Palazzo Farnese (to the left of the first image).  This is architectural humour, apparently.

It’s admittedly a good antidote to some of the frankly horrible featureless corporate blocks which dominate the area, but the real problem, as ever in architecture, is in the detail.

It’s just all too plastic looking, especially the ‘renaissance’ stone detailing, which, although it is actual stone, looks like plastic panels with visible gaps between; the stonework doesn’t meet the floor.

Anyway, enough already with the moaning.  This was the last dying gasp of PoMo as a style in Berlin, and on the whole gave way to a mixture of straight pastiche and  corporate modernism that frankly isn’t much better.

Location: bounded by Schützenstrasse, Charlottenstrasse, Zimmerstrasse and Markgrafenstrasse.

By way of technical accuracy, the design is jointly by Rossi, with M. Kocher, M. Scheurer, Götz Bellmann and Walter Böhm. I’ve the latter two listed as ‘planning partners’ in various guidebooks. I assume this means that they were involved in the overall planning of the scheme but not the detailed design. This would make sense, as Bellmann and Böhm were the designers of ‘New Hackescher Markt’ – a series of buildings and courtyards to the northeast of Museum Insel.

Cycling into the city centre the other day I thought I’d take a new route, down Kurstrasse. It’s still something of a backstreet, despite being a block away from the site of the still-being-demolished DDR Palast Der Republik, but it seems major things are afoot.

One side of the street is entirely filled with the imposing neoclassical bulk of the Foreign Office. It was built as the Reichsbank, one of the first major buildings to be constructed by the Third Reich, to designs by Heinrich Wolff. In between 1945 and now, it’s been the DDR’s Finance Ministry, then the HQ of the ruling SED communist party (and at the same time the seat of the Politburo). The building was extended in the 1990s (Berlin’s main info website understandably downplays the presence of the older, National Socialist, part of the building).

Anyway, everything on the other side of the street is brand new, or still under construction. The new work appears at first glance to be a terrace of tall narrow townhouses, in a range of styles and materials, with generally modernist or half-hearted postmodern frontages.

I’m guessing that the city planners decided that the unforgiving facade of the Foreign Office couldn’t be met by an equivalent monolithic modernist facade across the street – i.e. the type of design which dominates so much of Berlin’s new government district. It might lead to uncomfortable comparisons. I’m also guessing that they then had two choices:

a) A single huge design for the street, but employing a less ’severe’ architectural approach, which broke it down into more humanely scaled elements. Takes a very good architect to pull it off.

b) Breaking the facade up into what appears to be a whole series of separate buildings, each one different, where the quality of architecture in itself is not so prominent – i.e. the option that’s being built.

Post-blog note: an amendment.  As I recently learned at a conference in Porto, these buildings are indeed all separate plots, and in separate ownership, and largely residential townhouses.  The financial model used was quite deliberate, as an attempt to bring new ownership and new residents into this otherwise pretty dead part of town.  In terms of getting things built, this seems to have worked well.  The aspect I’m less sure of is whether the differing height and style of each building seems a little posed.  Despite their longing to appear individual, they’re clearly of the same age, and very similar in all but the most superficial styling.

A more successful attempt at the same idea (at least in terms of architecture) is perhaps in the eastern docks area of Amsterdam.  But that’s the Dutch for you.

Anyway, enough chat, here’s the photos of the street. For safety reasons, I got off the bike before taking them.

The Foreign Office/Finance Ministry, built 1933-40. It’s no shrinking violet, is it?

The new extension, by Thomas Müller and Ivan Reimann (the entrance is on Werderscher Markt, round the corner).

And then the other side of the road:

Note the strange stonework, enlarged below:

A rather photo-heavy post, but excused by the fact that Axel Schultes’ crematorium is such a very photogenic building, particularly the interior.

Schultes is best known for his masterplan of Berlin’s government district around the Reichstag, and his practice’s designs for the Chancellory (Angela Merkel’s formal residence).  Pictures of the Chancelllory are at the end – nothing wrong with the design, which uses some of the same themes and detailing, but somehow the whole building seems vastly overscaled;  the Treptow crematorium is by far the more impressive piece of work.

Anyway, more images of the crematorium…

The columns are arranged apparently randomly around a large central space, off which are four chapels.  In fact, the columns are carefully placed around a small circular fountain/pool in the centre, and subtly aligned with the features of the walls.  The light from the head of each column is daylight – a clever structural arrangement allows for the column to be attached into the side of a circular hole.  I could have spent the whole day just wandering around the place.

The pool has an egg almost invisibly suspended just above it.  Permanent, or an Easter connection?  Not sure.  Am guessing the former, as it must be quite an operation to set up such an apparently simple thing.

One of the four chapels.

Curiously, gaps in the floor along the outer walls are filled with fine white sand, lit from beneath the floor level.  Any overt meaning is lost on me.

The obligatory ‘angled arty image’.

Another oddity.  Scattered around the perimeter of the building are hundreds of funerary urns and stones, presumably predating the new crematorium building.  It’s as if the whole structure had just landed on its site, scattering everything that was there.  But quite a deliberate detail, I’m guessing.

Finally, as noted at the top, some images of Schultes’ Bundeskanzleramt, taken on an open day last August (many of the government district’s buildings are open to the public once a year).  In retrospect, I have to say that it all looks more effective in the photos than I remember it on the day.  Maybe it’s the ivy?  Anyway, interesting to note (interesting to me at least) that the same blue anodized metal is used for detailing (railings, vent panels etc) throughout, as in the crematorium.  External columns also follow the same design as the crematorium’s internal space.  Although you can’t really make out the heads of these in the image – it’s that ivy.

Schultes’ master plan creates a ‘long thin’ government district which crosses the Spree twice;  the Chancellery gardens are reached across the pedestrian bridge on the left.

They need to keep that trimmed back…  (you can make out Hugh Stubbins’ Haus der Kulturen der Welt in the background). 

Note the blue metal detailing – not 100% sure that I like the effect.  But the ivy looks good.

I’m getting loads of hits at the moment from searches for ‘David Chipperfield Berlin’ which I guess are all looking for stuff about the Neues Museum.  Sorry!  The building will open as a museum ‘proper’ in October.   My own brief post and images here.

My original post, on Chipperfield’s slightly older building which is directly opposite the Neues Museum:

Just a quickie, to post a photo of David Chipperfield’s gorgeous new ’townhouse for the arts’ in central Berlin.  It’s actually much bigger in person than it may appear here, as the storey heights are very tall.  (Obviously, it’s hard to do a full scale photo of a building in a blog, unless you’re reading this on a screen the size of a building.  You’re probably not.)

The surrounding area is a building site at the moment (an unavoidable side effect of making buildings, I guess) so the pictures lack that archi-pornographic quality: the absence of people, cars and the general mess of urbanity.

Chipperfield is rather big with the Germans – he just won Britain’s Stirling Prize for his Museum of Modern Literature in Marbach am Neckar, and his massive project for the re-ordering of Berlin’s Museum Island is currently under construction (across the road from the gallery shown here).

Needless to say that although he’s a British architect, he’s built very little in Britain.  In part this is because

a) he’s not Norman Foster

b) the British have no time for architects who talk about anything but lettable floor area.

The BBC dumped him from the detailed design of their new Glasgow centre, which he claims he won’t step foot in until he gets an apology from the DG.  His most notable UK building prior to this was Henley’s very low-key River & Rowing Museum.

Not that Berlin’s recent architecture is beyond criticism. The designs by various starchitects* which have filled in great swathes of post-Wall wilderness since the early 1990s (Potsdamerplatz in particular) are, shall we say, not their best work.  And since then Berlin seems to be sliding dangerously into a ‘non-critical reconstruction’ of its past, the most notable example being the planned reconstruction of the Royal Palace on the site of the old GDR Palas Der Republik.  Presumably the fact that the Germans have no royal family, and cannot agree on what to put in the building, are issues that can be addressed, well, some other time.

So it’s good to occasionally see a new building which isn’t in thrall to corporate glazing or historicist pastiche.

Chipperfield has an office here in Berlin, by the way.  The most notable other completed project is some apartments he did overlooking a small park area round the back of Potsdamerplatz (behind the Sony Centre).  I’ve borrowed a couple of images here from Exe on Flickr, hope he doesn’t mind.  He’s got a much better one of Am Kupfergraben as well, without clutter.

*I hate this term but it seems increasingly apt these days.

I didn’t know that much about Hans Poelzig – he’s less well known to the public at large than the ‘big names’ of modernism – Mies, Gropius and others. So I got a lot out of the recent exhibition at the Akademie der Kunst (ADK), a really extensive show covering the full breadth of his work as architect, film & theatre set designer, teacher and painter.

Poelzig’s output was prodigious, and his career spanned that fascinating period from turn-of-the-century Expressionism through to the white walls and strip windows of so-called International Modernism. He’s categorised as an expressionist, but his work was entirely original. His designs have no ‘house style’, but Poelzig was at the forefront of the search for a ‘new’ architecture, one capable of expressing the new buildings of the early 20th century; factories, cinemas and office buildings.

Poelzig died in 1936, just as the National Socialists were turning firmly against modernism in favour of a dull stripped neo-classism (I note this is described in several Berlin guides as ‘anti-modernism’). Like many of his contemporaries, Poelzig had no desire to reach an accomodation with the Nazi regime, and had made plans to relocate to the more enlightened atmosphere of Istanbul.

As with so much in Berlin, WWII bombing was responsible for the loss of many buildings, but some very significant Poelzig projects have survived. To my knowledge, these are the key ones.

The Haus des Rundfunk (House of Radio) – frequently and incorrectly decribed as art deco – is Poelzig’s largest extant building in the capital. A 1987 renovation restored the building to its former glory and revealed some very impressive interiors (in stark comparison with Poelzig’s Großes Schauspielhaus on the eastern side of the wall – see below). The building is vast, with a long low frontage built in a gorgeous dark brick, which I’m very drawn to (a similar brick is used to impressive effect in a building virtually next door to me in Kreuzberg – more on this another day). Like the BBC’s Broadcasting House in London, it’s still in use by a broadcaster, RBB (Radio Brandenburg Berlin), although the Rundfunk predated Broadcasting House by a couple of years as the first purpose built radio broadcasting facility.

Most accessible in central Berlin is the Babylon Kino (cinema) on Rosa-Luxemburg Platz. Some more images here.

The cinema forms one of two surviving blocks from Poelzig’s original masterplan for the whole area, which included the Volksbühne (People’s Theatre). The impressively severe version of the Volksbühne now standing was rebuilt by Hans Richter between 1950-54, replacing the heavily bombed original 1914 design by Oscar Kaufman. The Poelzig blocks themselves also suffered from bomb damage and have been altered, but retain a real sense of the originals – the cinema is still in operation as an important art house venue; there’s also a very cool music store at ground floor. On a trivia note, this is the theatre that features in both pre and post Stasi-era Berlin in Das Leben der Anderen (’The Lives of Others’), as well as several other notable Berlin locations.

According to the AKD exhibition, Poelzig’s own house in Grunewald (a pleasant Berlin suburb) was in fact almost entirely designed by his wife Marlene. Apparently Hans had a lesser interest in housing than some of his contemporaries. I’ve not had a chance to see this yet, and don’t know about access/ownership. Maybe a follow-on spot for this one, on the theme of modernist family homes in Grunewald and neighbouring Dahlem…

Maddeningly, one Poelzig work in Berlin which you won’t be able to see is his spectacular Großes Schauspielhaus (Grand Theatre).

The Nazis remodelled the main space, then the GDR allowed it to fall derelict, then tore it down in the late 1980s. The exhibition includes some heartbreaking shots of the demolition, including the destruction of the beautiful plant-frond-like structures of the foyer.

Poelzig adapted the existing building to form a huge theatre space with the overall effect of a guilded cavern, with stalactite-like structures descending from a central dome.

On a really arcanely trivial note, the expressionist design appears to have heavily influenced the sets in David Lynch’s otherwise terrible sci-fi film Dune, although this fits in a sort of logical loop, given that Poelzig designed film sets, most notably an entire village for the film The Golem.

Post-blog note: It’s not just me; someone else had the same thought, and has tracked down some images to prove the point, including this one by way of comparison:

(bizarrely this is sourced from a blog about bulldogs)

Its influence is clear…