Reference to a similar large-scale project on the southern edge of the Tiergarten, a project that has gone through a true planning odyssey, appears reassuring: the Culture Forum [Kulturforum] conceived by architect Hans Scharoun. Here, too, the promise of urbanity that was made when construction began could only be redeemed forty years later, in roundabout ways, to be sure, and then only because another large-scale project was unexpectedly added in the form of [the redevelopment of] Potsdamer Platz. Incidentally, these tribulations have not in any way detracted from the radiance that emanates to this day from Scharoun’s masterpiece, the Philharmonic.
East of the Reichstag building one can now start to see the mass of construction that has accumulated north and south of Dorotheenstraße as well as Luisenstraße.* The names that have been given to these ensembles, the Jakob Kaiser House and the Marie Elisabeth Lüders House, may well find their justification in the history of democracy, but from the perspective of urban planning they are confusing. In this aggregation of large, highly compact blocks there is a concentration of more than 300,000 square meters of floor space – nearly a quarter of the entire space used by the federal government in Berlin. Moreover, these are single-use office spaces with little chance of establishing an urban, mixed-use environment with, for example, stores, restaurants, or even residential space.
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III. The Federal Government in the Old Center
Only a few hundred meters further south of the Linden, the blocks of Friedrichstadt between Wilhelmstraße and Markgrafenstraße show the positive effects of weaving various federal ministries into the existing architectural structure. The buildings of the Federal Ministry of Justice, the Federal Ministry for Family Affairs, Senior Citizens, Women, and Youth, the Federal Ministry of Labor and Social Affairs, or the former Prussian House of Lords [Herrenhaus], used today by the Bundesrat, connect to a tradition of utilization that is more than a hundred years old in some cases, and they offer evidence of a living culture of re-utilization that is appropriate for historical monuments.** No aura of unapproachability – from exaggerated security demands, for example – emanates from these buildings; they hardly generate any displacement effects, rather they offer a certain measure of urban contact surface, which can give rise to high-quality utilization networks linked to other high-quality locations but also to secondary uses such as restaurants or service providers. Numerous federal states have their representation in Friedrichstadt, and a number of foreign embassies are located there as well, for example, those of France, Great Britain, Poland, or Belgium. This shows that these institutions have followed the example of the federal government. Their existence is convincing proof that the demands of a capital and urbanity are reconcilable. One exception might be the United States embassy on Pariser Platz, whose heightened security requirements are evidently leading to some urban planning concessions that are actually unacceptable for the city’s layout and for the restoration of public spaces at this very prominent location.
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* See Bundesministerium für Verkehr, Bau- und Wohnungswesen, Demokratie als Bauherr – Die Bauten des Bundes in Berlin 1991-2000 [Federal Ministry for Transportation, Building, and Housing, Democracy as Client: The Buildings of the Federal Government in Berlin, 1991-2000] (Hamburg-Berlin, 2000), p. 70ff.
** See Jürgen Tietz, “Glück auf” [“Good luck”], in Architektur in Berlin-Jahrbuch 2000 [Architecture in Berlin-Yearbook 2000] (Hamburg-Dresden, 2000), p. 32; Landesdenkmalamt Berlin, Hauptstadt Berlin – Denkmalpflege für Parlament, Regierung und Diplomatie [Historic Preservation Office of Berlin, Capital City Berlin: Historic Preservation for Parliament, Government, and Diplomacy] (Berlin, 2000).
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