Abstract
In what ways does the built environment carry meaning? How is such meaning created through architectural design and in relationship to its audience? What does it mean for architectural design to fail? It is large questions such as these that are addressed by both Julia Walker and Dominik Bartmanski in their recent monographs. While Walker focuses on major architectural projects along the historical city center of Berlin (Spreebogen), Bartmanski expands his analysis to Berlin and Warsaw and a more theoretically informed discussion of these questions. Nevertheless, both authors bring to the forefront how not only urban but post-socialist spaces are (re-)configured and how, in turn, such spaces shape cultural meanings and political identities.
Walker’s Berlin Contemporary is empirically rich, and the author takes the reader into a deep dive of the political processes and negotiations that accompany and shape urban development. The main aim driving this book is to unpack the processes by which architecture claims political identity and to situate such identities globally.
Berlin Contemporary is divided into four content chapters, each focusing on large post-1990s architectural projects in Berlin’s historical city center around the Spreebogen (an area where Berlin’s main river, the Spree, bends in a semi-circular shape). Her first chapter explores the planning of the Spreebogen, followed by a chapter discussing the architectural changes made to the Reichstag, one on the Chancellery, and finally one on the reconstruction of Berlin’s City Palace and the demolition of the German Democratic Republic’s (GDR’s) Palace of the Republic. Each chapter goes into detail about the architectural competitions—and alternative versions that were proposed but not realized—as well as the meanings conveyed by the different architectural projects.
Walker’s book starts with a close examination of the construction of government buildings around the Spreebogen, an area in Berlin’s geographical city center. This area was uninhabited during Berlin’s division as it was the border strip between East and West Berlin. With the German reunification in 1990 and the decision to make Berlin the capital of the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG), the area around the Spreebogen became once again an area of governing. In painting a picture of the area, Walker reaches back as far as 1647 when a bridle path between the former City Castle and the royal hunting grounds of the Tiergarten (literally Animal Garden) was built under Friedrich Wilhelm, the Great Elector of Prussia. This historically sensitive approach to the site lays the foundation for a book that carefully traces historical, political, and cultural processes and meanings of its current architecture. The bridle path became Unter den Linden, one of Berlin’s main boulevards, which is flanked by several significant buildings such as Humboldt University, Crown Prince’s Palace, several embassy buildings, and the Brandenburg Gate. Just past the Brandenburg Gate—adjacent to Tiergarten and on the Spreebogen—lies the Reichstag building. Designed by Paul Wallot and completed in 1894, the Reichstag became the seat of the legislature of the new German Empire. As Walker explains in detail, the area around the Spreebogen has since served as a vision board of both democratic and authoritarian regimes. It is careful research of how both vision and realization come to be in the newly formed unified Germany that interests Walker. Drawing on Habermas’s concept of communicative action, the author states her interest to “illuminate how architects proposing to intervene in Berlin’s fraught present found themselves at the center of a larger debate over how to deal with history’s incursion into public awareness in the 1990s” (p. 44). In what follows, she carefully outlines how architectural competitions shaped how Berlin’s historic center was re-developed after 1990. What Walker also shows is how much these architectural competitions expressed a spirit of Berlin imagined as a tabula rasa with suddenly newfound global relevance. The author goes into detail describing the different visions proposed and how they engaged with the existing built environment and history of the place. What becomes clear is both how many possibilities of urban development there were in the early 1990s but also how much those planning debates were shaped by Western (often international) perspectives. However, this wider picture is not made explicit in the book. Instead, Walker emphasizes the democratic and public context in which planning debates took place (p. 52), starting with the Spreebogen competition which with 835 submissions, according to Walker, was the “largest urban planning ever held” anywhere in the world (p. 54). The winning design Band des Bundes (literally Federal Band) by Schultes and Frank was modern yet referenced previous buildings that have existed on the site. Or, as Walker put it, their proposal was one “in which the ghosts of Spreebogens push past their way into the present” (p. 61). I very much enjoyed reading Walker’s interpretation of Schultes and Frank’s proposal as one that is intentionally ambiguous by creating a bridge to the past yet insisting on fragmentation not only as an expression of modernity but also as a commentary on Berlin and the area of the Spreebogen specifically. Ultimately, as Walker points out, the completed Band des Bundes—after having undergone several changes—no longer holds this ambiguation but instead appears fragmented and, as an architectural project, is largely disliked by Germans.
Berlin Contemporary next focuses on the post-1990 history of the Reichstag, wedged between the Brandenburg Gate, Tiergarten, and Spreebogen. Walker unpacked some of its historical meaning in her previous chapter on the Spreebogen competition. She then moves on to discuss the now-famous wrapping of the Reichstag by artists Christo and Jeanne-Claude in 1995. Walker argues that the wrapping of the Reichstag made the “reframing of this overly visible building” possible (p. 80). I found this argument interesting as it contrasts with my own experience of the building. While it is with no doubt a large if not bulky building, its location by the “death strip” also kept it largely out of view for Germans from both sides during the time of Berlin’s division. In this sense, I wonder if its wrapping did more than reframing how it was perceived and also re-introduced it to Germans, and Berliners in particular. After all, many Germans only knew the building through collective memory and images of the war. Walker continues the chapter with a discussion of Norman Foster’s renovation/reconstruction of the building and how much his architecture is more than just design but a deliberate pondering of history. As in the previous chapter, Walker carefully ponders the delicate role of contemporary architecture in 1990s Berlin as one that exceeds design and instead engages and shapes cultural, political, and historical meanings. At the same time, she unpacks how designs are altered and intended meanings are shifted. In Foster’s original design proposal for the Reichstag, the building was meant to be covered by an oversized canopy, thereby “lightening the materiality of the stone and smoothing the bulky ornament” (p. 101) as well as serving as a protected place for the public. However, in the end, the idea of a canopy was given up on by the Bundestag due to cost and aesthetic competition with Schultes and Frank’s Spreebogen in favor of reconstructing a dome in a modernized form. As Walker points out, just as with the design of the Spreebogen, it was the public forum that ultimately was given up on.
The third chapter of Walker’s Berlin Contemporary centers on the Chancellery, an entirely new building at the Spreebogen site. To contextualize the design of this new construction on a historic site, Walker begins the chapter with a discussion of what she calls “ruin-wrapping,” an approach developed by American architect Louis I. Kahn who, as Walker argues, “hovers like a beneficent spirit over the New Berlin’s government architecture” (p. 125). What is more, the new Chancellery’s design needed to take into consideration both the existing Chancellery in Bonn, a modest bungalow style building, as well as the Reich Chancellery. The latter was built under Albert Speer as part of the Hitler’s planning of Germania, capital of the German Reich. Walker here makes a nuanced argument that, in some ways, similar to the design of the Spreebogen, the design of the Chancellery carefully had to negotiate the site’s and building’s real and imagined past.
Walker’s last chapter moves away from the area around the Spreebogen to the opposite end of Unter den Linden and focuses on the construction of the Humboldt Forum. Just as she did elsewhere, this chapter too emphasizes the historical context of the site. But more than that, Walker also manages to describe the relevance of historical context to those who played a part in the redesign process of the site of the former Stadtschloss. The chapter begins with the architects Frank and Schultes who claimed to have found a plaster model of the area around the—at the time former—Schlossplatz supposedly developed by Prussian architect Karl Friedrich Schinkel. Quickly dismissed as a prank by the media and the public, the prank, Walker argues, was also a commentary on the role still ascribed to Schinkel’s dominance as the architect of the historic city center of Berlin. In the end, it was the reconstruction of the Prussian Stadtschloss in its baroque version—with the exception of one façade and one of its two courtyards—that won the competition. As Walker writes, “the reconstruction travesties the utopian sociopolitical aspirations that gave modernism its meaning” (p. 181). In other words, by reaching to Berlin’s baroque past as a model for the construction of the Humboldt Forum, not only were more modern versions of what could have been built on the site denied, but it was also a signal for a more conservative, if not revisionist, politics. The decision-making process to construct the Humboldt Forum, of course, took place in conjunction with negotiations over what to do with the Palast der Republik; the socialist “palace” that was built on the site under the order of the GDR government in the 1970s. Walker devotes considerable space to the GDR’s decision to demolish the ruins of the original German Stadtschloss—heavily damaged during WWII—and to build a “House of the People” in its place. As she points out, while also hosting the Volkskammer, the GDR’s quasi-democratic parliament, the Palast der Republik as cultural center did successfully serve as a “social space for a large cross section of the public” (p. 190) mainly by offering shows performed by national and international (and occasionally Western) artists.
As in the previous chapters, the author describes in detail how decisions over the demolition and ultimately construction of the Humboldt Forum were made. It is Walker’s careful deliberation of the realized and unrealized possibilities which I appreciated the most in this book. It is also where I saw a dialogue between Walker’s Berlin Contemporary and Bartmanski’s Matters of Revolution.
The outline of Matters of Revolution is starkly different from Berlin Contemporary. Using post-1989 Berlin and Warsaw as an empirical backdrop, at the core of Matters of Revolution stands the argument that space, including the built environment, shapes social meanings and actions in fundamental ways. Bartmanski’s book starts with a chapter on how and why meaning is created from a sociological point of view and the ways in which we can use such an approach for a deeper understanding of the built environment. The chapter is theoretically rich and provides a framework for the remainder of the book. He argues that we ought to consider the “phenomenological power” (p. 28) of things made visible, or invisible, in public space. It is especially times of reconfiguration (or revolution), so his argument continues, that create visibility of what he calls “iconic components of cityscapes” (p. 29). Different from indexical elements of material culture, which reference past and present cultural meanings, iconic entities shape collective meaning.
Particularly, the second chapter is centered on the question of why some architecture takes on iconic meanings while others do not. To this end, Bartmanski argues that it requires a coming together (or an alignment as he calls it) of the material, the discursive, and the (collective) experience that creates iconic symbols. Unlike Berlin Contemporary, Bartmanski’s book does not focus on one building in each chapter. Instead, it is theoretically driven and discusses various examples of architecture based on the theoretical arguments made. One of the points made in this particular chapter that I appreciated the most was Bartmanski’s critique of an overly linguistic understanding of the world, including space, in the social sciences (and humanities). Instead, he argues it is “distributive materialities” (p. 45), such as shape, scale, style, and substance of these objects that make them iconic.
Developing this argument further, Matters of Revolution explores why the “fall” of the Berlin Wall has become a symbol not only of German reunification but also of the end of Soviet-style socialism in general. While this question has been asked by others, 1 Bartmanski centers not only on the question of how iconicity was created but also on the power icons possess in creating collective memories. Here, the author introduces the concept of “iconspicuity” to describe the process by which an icon is capable of “relegating other, less or non-iconic phenomena to the margins of collective consciousness, even if they are co-present in a given temporal context” (p. 59). In other words, and similar to how Walker approaches architectural objects, for Bartmanski, spatial configurations, unlike temporal configurations, possess a permanence that resides with the presence of the object itself. In order to explain why it is the Berlin Wall, and not other spatial objects, that has become iconic, Bartmanski introduces us to four concepts: accretion of iconic capital (the accumulation of meaning over time), iconic congruity (the fall of the Berlin Wall as a collective symbol for drastic societal change), the icon as an imagined commodity (in the case of the Berlin Wall, the way in which its absence was marked and how it was distributed globally post-1989), and fourth, contingent iconic events (such as the infamous press conference with Günter Schabowski on November 9, 1989). The coming together of these four concepts, he argues, made it no coincidence that it is the Berlin Wall that became a global symbol for the end of Soviet-style socialism rather than spatial objects in Poland, Hungary, or any of the other former member states of the Eastern Bloc whose citizens participated—at times arguably more so or sooner than the GDR—in the upheaval against the existing political system.
In his third chapter, Bartmanski centers on the topic of nostalgia or Ostalgie (a wordplay on the German words Osten and Nostalgie) which starts with the broader question of why—if there was a “peaceful revolution” initiated by GDR citizens—is there an ongoing longing for the GDR. Bartmanski notes that Ostalgie is typically expressed as a nostalgia for material culture that has largely disappeared in reunified Germany. At the same time, he argues, it is objects, images, and spaces that constitute nostalgia. I found this chapter the least accessible, partly due to one of the core assumptions put forward by the book, including the book’s title: that German reunification was a revolution which brought to the surface iconic meanings. Going into the book—and based on its title—I expected a discussion of the terms under which we ought to understand German reunification as revolutionary. Yet, it is only in this third content chapter that Bartmanski defines the concept as “a re-figuration, i.e. a re-arranging of spatial and symbolic relations” (p. 103). A more in-depth discussion of what a revolution is and is not would have been helpful overall and for this chapter in particular. That is because much of the argument of the chapter rests on the assumption that the changes of 1989 were not only revolutions but also “anti-communist revolutions” (p. 88). From this perspective, longing for a socio-political regime that—at the same time—has been rejected appears indeed paradoxical. However, many scholars of post-socialist East Germany have suggested that the rejection of a political regime did not equate a rejection of socialism as an idea. 2 While Bartmanski goes into detail about how the topic of nostalgia for the East has been explored by other scholars, 3 he ascribes the mourning for the failed socialist project to musings of “various intellectuals on the left” (p. 94) that do not explain Ostalgie as a mass phenomenon. Yet, many scholars have found that this sentiment has been expressed on a broad socio-economic spectrum rather than only by an intellectual elite. 4
Instead, Bartmanski claims that one ought to consider spatial and symbolic dimensions when trying to explain the phenomenon Ostalgie using the German Ampelmännchen and Warsaw’s neon signs as examples of such iconic ostalgic symbols. He argues that nostalgia is a “phenomenological process” (p. 104) and that spatially both the Ampelmännchen and neon signs had both been part of the urban fabric yet had been considered apolitical, which enabled a nostalgic bridging between now and socialist times. I find that argument compelling even though I am not convinced that Bartmanski’s understanding negates the possibility that Ostalgie can also be a longing for a lost utopia.
In his last chapter, he discusses iconic sites in Berlin and Warsaw such as the Palast der Republik, the Fernsehturm (TV tower), the residential buildings that line Karl-Marx-Allee, and Warsaw’s Palace of Culture and Science. Compelled to explain why the Palast der Republik was demolished whereas the Palace of Culture and Science was not, he argues that buildings need both iconic and utilitarian function to prevail across changing times. Bartmanski argues that for iconic buildings to exist, there needs to be an alignment of “site,” “scale,” “substance,” and “style” (p. 131). While Walker does not use this same terminology, the question of site, scale, substance, and style do linger over her discussion of the buildings of Berlin’s historical center. Whereas Matters of Revolution considers a broader understanding of the built environment and offers theoretical concepts that explain why some take on iconic meanings, Berlin Contemporary centers on the nitty-gritty details of the decision-making process in the creation of architecture. What is more, Walker, too, contemplates how collective meanings of an architectural project both shape the project and vice versa. Both books contribute to a deepened understanding of how architecture in post-socialist spaces shape our understanding of the past and would be of great interest to cultural sociologists, scholars of the urban environment, and architects.