The first time I arrived in Berlin I got off the U-Bahn at Potsdamer Platz and could not get my bearings. I had a mental map built on historical photographs — the busiest square in Europe before the war, then the nothingness of the Wall, then the enormous building site of the 1990s — and what I saw corresponded to none of those images. Potsdamer Platz today is a district of glass towers from the 1990s that already seems dated, built on top of a void, surrounded by traces of the Wall marked in the paving. I understood that Berlin works like this: you cannot understand it without knowing what was there before, and you cannot know what was there before without looking at the scars of what is there now.
Berlin is the only city in which architecture is avowedly a historical document — not by museum convention, but because every significant building constructed here since 1945 has had to answer the question: what do you do with this space that was destroyed, divided, forgotten, then reunified?
Neue Nationalgalerie — absolute minimalism
Mies van der Rohe designed the Neue Nationalgalerie in 1968, the last building of his career, the one in which he took to their extreme consequences all he had thought over fifty years. It is a steel roof on eight columns, suspended above a completely open space. The walls are glass. There are no internal piers. The exhibition space on the upper level is a single room where everything is visible from every point. It seems simple — it is obsessively complex.
The practical problem is that a totally open space, with no fixed dividing walls, is almost impossible to use for a permanent collection. Works need controlled light, separate contexts, routes. The Neue Nationalgalerie is a museum that works badly as a museum and very well as an architectural manifesto. Mies knew it. It was not a design error: it was a declaration of principle — that pure form precedes function, that architecture has an autonomy that must not be sacrificed to convenience.
Mies's method and radical Modernism: Mies van der Rohe — less is more and its consequences.
Holocaust Memorial — Peter Eisenman and the field of stelae
The Holocaust Memorial is a five-minute walk from the Brandenburg Gate, on ground that during the division lay in the death strip between the two walls. It is composed of 2,711 concrete stelae of different heights, laid out in a regular grid on ground that undulates irregularly. From outside, from the edge, it looks like a field of gravestones. When you enter, the field empties of visitors — it absorbs them — and you remain alone in corridors of grey concrete that grow to four metres above your head.
There is no obligatory route. There is no centre. There is no right direction. Disorientation is the mechanism of the project: Eisenman built a space in which the sense of loss and irrationality is produced by the geometry itself, not by symbols or captions. There are no words on the stelae. There are no names. Only mass and weight and the strange silence that forms inside, even when the city is noisy all around.
Reichstag — Norman Foster's dome
The Reichstag was bombed, burned, abandoned, divided by the Wall, and finally — after reunification — restored to its function as a parliament. Norman Foster won the competition in 1993 with a project that originally envisaged a giant flat roof suspended over the historic building. The spiral glass dome, which is today the image of contemporary Berlin, came later — a modification requested by the Bundestag that produced something better than the original project.
The dome has two spiral ramps that rise to the top: one for going up, one for coming down. At the centre is an inverted mirrored cone that reflects light downward into the parliamentary chamber. The logic is double: natural lighting of the chamber and the symbolism of democratic transparency — citizens can literally look down from above on their representatives at work. Foster does something rare in architecture: he uses a functional construction element to communicate a political value without becoming didactic.
The restoration and transparency as architectural language: Norman Foster — high-tech as democracy.
Neues Museum — David Chipperfield and the restoration that shows the wounds
The Neues Museum was bombed during the Second World War and left in ruins for decades, first in the GDR, which had neither funds nor will to restore it, then in the limbo of reunification. David Chipperfield won the restoration competition in 1997 and took twelve years to complete it. The basic choice is radical: not to restore the original appearance of the building, but to show the wounds.
The destroyed walls were reintegrated with new bricks — but bricks of a slightly different tone from the original, so that you can see exactly where the nineteenth century ends and 2009 begins. The missing floors were replaced with modern tiles. The destroyed staircases were redesigned from scratch. The result is a building that tells its own history in its physical structure — not in the caption beside it, not in the catalogue. Time is visible in the matter.
The restoration method as a contemporary project: David Chipperfield — restoration as critical position.
The city that remains
Berlin is the only city in which I can never forget history while I walk. Not because there are educational panels everywhere — on the contrary, Berliners are fairly restrained in their signage. It is because the traces are in the city itself: the line of the Wall in the paving, the difference between the orange light of the East's sodium lamps and the white light of the West's, the urban gap between districts that for decades did not speak to each other. Berlin has not made peace with the twentieth century: it lives with it, wears it, transforms it into architecture.
It is perhaps for this reason that it became the world capital of contemporary architecture in the 1990s: every designer who arrived here brought their own answer to a question the city posed in an urgent and physical way. How do you build after the catastrophe? The result is chaotic, contradictory, at times successful and at times wrong. But it is honest in a way few cities in the world allow themselves to be.