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| Berlin Wallpaper by Peter Conradi |
The "Palast der Republik", captured in memory in Stefanie Bürkle’s Berlin Wallpaper, is edifice of German history. It is no architectural highlight like its counterpart in West Berlin, the no-longer inspiring International Congress Centrum. But neither was its predecessor (and now future successor), the Berlin Stadtschloss, the “most significant Baroque castle north of the Alps,” as some of Berlin’s “Baroque and Roll Fans” would have it. It featured some outstanding and unique elements—such as the courtyard by Andreas Schlüter—but all in all the Berlin City Palace was a conglomerate of different styles, one that does not bear comparison with unified designs like the Würzburg Residenz or the Ludwigsburg Schloss.
Though heavily damaged in the Second World War, the Berlin Stadtschloss was not beyond repair. Its demolition in 1950 was political: a barbaric act to underscore the defeat of Prussia and the German Reich and to signal the beginning of a new era. Today, the same fate awaits the Palast der Republik, the building erected at the Stadtschloss site, and the parallels are hard to ignore. For political motivations were what, in the 1990s, drove the German Federal Government and the Berlin Senate to approve asbestos removal measures that would necessarily lead to the destruction of the palace—erasing forever an architectural monument of East-German history.
The same is true for the decision—made by the majority of expert commissions and Bundestag members—to dismiss alternative proposals. For the most part, the plan to rebuild, 50 years after its destruction, the Stadtschloss façade as part of a building with a completely unrelated function was based on considerations having to do neither with urban design nor with architecture but with politics.
Of course, efforts to restore buildings from the distant past are not limited to Berlin. Other projects in Germany include the Römerzeile in Frankfurt am Main, the Knochenhauerhaus in Hildesheim, the Frauenkirche in Dresden, and the Braunschweig castle, which was demolished in the 1960s and is now being rebuilt as the architectural shell of a giant shopping center. In Berlin, the buildings on the right and left of the Brandenburg Gate are also architectural shells. Though they appearing old, they are in reality poor-quality replicas. The same is true for the recent reconstruction of the Bertelsmann House, once an insignificant structure that was expanded in the 19th century and torn down after incurring major damage in the Second World War. Everywhere one finds the spirit of Las Vegas, the place that houses a recent replica of the Doge’s Palace in Venice along with an exact copy of Munich’s Hofbräuhaus. Feigning innocence, I recently asked a Berlin taxi driver about the new building across from the Zeughaus. “That’s an old building they just painted,” he said. The trick worked.
It is understandable that the insecurity and future angst created by rapid changes in economies, technology, and society have led many people to yearn for the good ol’ times (which in truth were never that good). But we should not obscure the tensions and conflicts of our times with aesthetic symbols of the past; we must face and solve them using the means of today. The decision to rebuild the Stadtschloss is a sign of faintheartedness and fear, of poverty of mind and a dearth of creativity.
The initiative to temporarily utilize the empty Palast until its demolition was a good way to provide a dignified and culturally-attune farewell to an historic edifice built in the tradition of the worker apartment buildings and “Kulturhäuser” of the late 19th and early 20th century. The brief opening last summer attracted thousands of interested visitors.
The building has since been “deboned”—the entire internal construction removed and only the naked steel structure and cement roof preserved. The ruin-like appearance of the Palast’s shell has its own aesthetic quality, which evokes Giambattista Piranesi’s spatial fantasies. Using it as a venue for music, theater, dance, play, and other happenings would have been great for artists and for Berlin; it would have been a sign of the vitality and fantasy of this city, a step against expanding tiredness and lack of perspective and against provincial-mindedness and boredom. Many other cities in East and West Germany would be happy to have such a structure to take advantage of. Bürkle’s photographic montage on wallpaper serves to commemorate the building; it is a sign of respect for the people and their architectural history. Her wallpaper is only a façade, but that is increasingly the case everywhere: façades completely detached from their buildings, without reference to use, to their inner spaces, to the construction. Interchangeable façades that make public space interchangeable and arbitrary.
The “Berlin Wallpaper” gives us a new way to appropriate the Palast, both publicly and privately. I have the wallpaper up at my Berlin office, in a new building on Askanischer Platz, and I always look forward to visitors’ responses. I can recommend buying a few meters of the Palast der Republic wallpaper to everyone. Use it for beautifying, for remembering, for reflecting, for thinking—about us and our time, about art and architecture, about the past and the future.
Peter Conradi is former president of the German chamber of architects.
Peter Conradi studied sociology in USA and architecture in Stuttgart. As member of the Bundestag (SPD) from 1972 till 1998 he was devoted to housing and urban development. He was President of the German Chamber of architects from 1999 till 2004.
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