ARTS
Architecture
Let the green grass grow
Alan Powers visits Potsdamer Platz, once the Piccadilly Circus of Berlin Turn north from the Berlin Philhar- monie, with its gilded walls and alpine roof like the Mappin Terraces and you cross an area of wasteland encamped by travelling circuses and gypsies. As you walk over the compacted rubble of the Potsdamer Platz, once the Piccadilly Circus of Berlin, you will not be the first to compare your pas- sage to Petrarch or Gibbon in submerged ruins of the Roman Forum.
At the end of the 20th century, no more testing site can be found for civic regenera- tion. Here, within sight of Hitler's bunker, the Berlin Wall passed through the remains of the city's heart, damaged by war but not irretrievable. As a result of the division, the remaining buildings, including the Colum- bushaus store by Eric Mendelsohn of 1932 and the earlier but hardly less remarkable Wertheim store of 1904 by Alfred Messel, were cleared to allow the searchlights and snipers a free field of view. The West responded by building the Kulturforum, perversely remote from its own centres of population, but knowingly placed for pur- poses of propaganda as near to the Wall as possible. After a concert at the Philhar- monie, buses arrive to take you back to civilisation, something that would be wel- come at our own South Bank. In this still howling waste, it is a necessity.
The Kulturforum, which was sited with a view to the then remote hope of reunifica- tion, was also a zoo of post-war architec- ture, setting completely opposed versions of modernism beside each other. Hans Scharoun (1893-1972), the architect of the Philharmonie and the nearby State Library, stayed and suffered in Berlin through the Third Reich, but his ability to correlate fantasy and function through irregular forms was finally recognised. The Philhar- monic works brilliantly both as an auditori- um, with its `terraces' of seating and as a space for the social occasion of concert going. It makes the Royal Festival Hall seem tightly buttoned into English restraint.
A short distance away, the 'new' National Gallery by Mies van der Rohe stands over its paved plinth with unwavering rigidity. At the time of its completion in 1968, this, rather than Scharoun, was the face of architecture to come, but too many imita- tions of Mies have dulled the effect of the original. Visible from the back of the gallery is a strange building striped sky blue and pink, the Berlin Science Centre by the late Sir James Stirling — the exotic birds section of the zoo. Other less distinctive animals are gathered nearby.
In the euphoria following reunification, Sony and Daimler Benz were among the International companies who bought up large sections of the Potsdamer Platz, and are now : steering architectural schemes towards realisation. Much anguish among architects was expressed when the city of Berlin rejected the master plan by Sir Richard Rogers commissioned by the own- ers of the site, in favour of a scheme by the Munich architects Hilmer and Sattler. Their scheme of island blocks along a rebuilt Potsdamer Strasse probably makes better commercial sense, but to hear that Christoph Sattler's inspiration came from the London Shell Mex building of 1935 was surprising and scarcely encouraging. Shell Mex has merits, but one is surely enough for the world. Now architects such as Hel- mut Jahn and Renzo Piano are filling out the envelopes of the master plan.
The intense multi-layered history of the Potsdamer Platz was described, with timely prescience, in a book, Berlin, the politics of order 1737-1989 by Alan Balfour, published in 1990 before Balfour became chairman of Libeskind's extension to the Berlin Museum the Architectural Association School in London. Now, in the dysphoric aftermath, the AA is holding a small exhibition on the Potsdamer Platz to accompany a confer- ence on 'The Politics of Space'. Balfour comments that in the need for speculative development, the 'historic city has tri- umphed' and the other kind of speculation, the exploration of ideas through architec- ture, has found no tolerance. Although he acknowledges Sattler's 'modest gesture' of connecting the Kulturforum eastwards with the old city, he still seeks destabilising pres- ence of Scharoun's concept of a liberating city.
It is hard to become enthusiastic for the zoo of stuffed animals which the Pots- damer Platz threatens to become. Perhaps the malaise in civilisation, so evident here where division and destruction have ruled for 60 years, is so deep rooted that no solu- tion is possible. The importance of Berlin, and of this site above all, is that it exposes the apparent inadequacy of architecture to face a world of sadness and loss, and to offer consolation without melodrama or triviality.
That this inadequacy lies as much with the conditions of patronage as with the architects themselves may be seen in the single truly avant-garde project actually being built among the hopes and disap- pointments of the new Berlin. The exten- sion to the Berlin Museum, to house the Jewish Museum, was won in competition in June 1989 by the Polish-born architect Daniel Libeskind and, although revised and reduced, is now being built next to the existing 18th-century museum building in Lindenstrasse, not far from the old Check- point Charlie. Libeskind was one of the competitors in the competition for the Potsdamer Platz, and will be one of the speakers at the AA conference. His muse- um extension, a zinc-clad building in the plan form of a zig-zag of lightning, is well described and illustrated in a monograph published in England by VCH Publishers of Cambridge (£19.95) which avoids the impenetrable verbiage usually accompany- ing such so-called deconstructivist designs and makes a convincing case for Libe- skind's design having the cathartic quality necessary for such a function. Only where shared emotion is channelled with intensity through a commissioning process already committed to achieving such ends can this be achieved.
For the Potsdamer Platz, the honest solution might have been to have let the grass grow for another hundred years, and see whether by then we are capable of fac- ing and exorcising the pain that such a place should properly evoke.
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