The first building in the initial stage of the huge Potsdamer Platz development which is intended to give Berlin a new heart.

History

Potsdamer Platz was one of Berlin's most important squares before the War: not very beautiful, either in urban form or architecture, but full of life, trams and traffic, always changing - a German equivalent of Piccadilly Circus or Times Square with sometimes a decent building like Schinkel's gatehouses and Mendelsohn's Columbus Haus. Bombs and shells put an end to most of the buildings. Then came the Wall, and almost everything that was left was razed to allow the guards a clear field of fire over the desolate minefields.

When Germany was reunited over a quarter of a century later, it was clear from the start that a lively new Potsdamer Platz would have to be created as a symbol of the rebirth of the city and nation. With the Wall removed, the site could once more relate to its neighbours, the Landwehr Kanal to the south, with the Tiergarten park and the Reichstag a short distance to the north. Scharoun's great buildings, the Philharmonie and the Preussischer Staatsbibliothek could be brought into urban conversation, whereas they had previously been forlornly isolated up against the Wall.

A working group was set up by the Senate of Berlin in 1990 and a competition held for the whole site south of the Tiergarten, east of the library and west of Leipziger Platz. Entries and results (announced in 1991) were controversial, with Hilmer & Sattler producing a rather timid first prize scheme (which fulfilled the intentions of City Architect Hans Stimmann and Wolfgang Nagel, Berlin senator in charge of building to create a 'critical reconstruction' of the pre-1940 plan by retaining most of the old street pattern). O. M. Ungers collected second prize for a rationalist cluster of towers intended to mark the place on the map of Berlin (and Europe), but this was seen as too arrogant a gesture by the jury.

In 1991, the owners of the sites within the redevelopment area (huge companies: Daimler Benz, Sony and others) commissioned Richard Rogers to make a counter masterplan. In 1991, he produced a very formal ahistorical scheme radiating from a glazed circus which locked into the octagon of Leipziger Platz; the proposal successfully linked all the major elements in and around the site in a genial urban scale (AR January 1993, p21). The Senate turned the proposal down, but asked Hilmer & Sattler to incorporate some of Rogers' ideas, particularly natural ventilation and lighting of the buildings, into the masterplan.

The plan

The landowners were required to develop within the Hilmer & Sattler masterplan and each held further competitions. First prize in the Daimler Benz one went to Renzo Piano with Christoph Kohlbecker (AR November 1992, p4). The winner of the Sony competition was Helmut Jahn. The Daimler-Benz site is the most southerly one. To the north, before you get to the park is the Sony triangle where Jahn is building offices (including the firm's European headquarters), housing and shopping spaces round a giant ovoid urban entertainment centre which will contain the Filmhaus and Deutsche Mediathek, as well as an IMAX and numerous cinemas. To the east of the Piano site, is Linkstrasse, which will have a green linear park in its centre (is this a wise move?) and, on the other side, is to be a series of courtyard blocks on the A+T site designed within Giorgio Grassi's overall plan by different architects including Roger Diener and Jurgen Sawade. All these sites meet at the Potsdamer Platz itself: an irregular public space, not unlike the old one. It adjoins Leipziger Platz, which is to be recreated on its old octagonal plan (the hamfistedness of its first new building sadly promises some sort of scaleless neo-poMo extravaganza here).

Piano's parti for the Mercedes Benz site is not very complicated to understand in principle. (Though it is difficult to comprehend at the moment in the midst of the vast turmoil on the largest building site in Europe, all of which is amazingly intended to be completed at the end of this year.) From Potsdamer Platz, an avenue, Alte Potsdamer Strasse, lined with mature trees (which astonishingly survived all the destruction) runs south-west to the opposite side of the development area. Here, Marlene Dietrich Platz, a new pedestrian square is to be created, appropriately cradled in the arms of a new casino and a music hall. These back onto the great blank gold east wall of the Staatsbibliothek, into which it is hoped at some time to make a new entrance from Marlene Dietrich (though the library authorities are at the moment opposed to the move because of disruption caused by the colossal works to their east). The other major geometrical moves in the urban plan are retention of the traditional lines of north-south Linkstrasse and the boomerang of strangely named Eichhornstrasse (Acorn Street). From this simple matrix, the other thoroughfares of the complex take their pattern, much as would the minor streets of a nineteenth-century city after its main lines had been laid out.