Urban development in Berlin: Please wake up, there is a lot to do

We must look again to Venice. We received complaints after the last text in which we outlined Berlin’s chances of presenting itself at the world’s most important architects’ exhibition.

Tenor: It’s all well and good if some offices want to present themselves and spend the money on it. But Berlin as a whole remains remarkably invisible in the international debate. Especially compared to the 1990s and 2010s. Even if this era of the eloquent and decisive Senate Building Director Hans Stimmann is now perceived in a rather idealized way: the complaint is true. Unfortunately.

Nicholas Bernau is an architect and art historian as well as an architecture critic.

So here’s an order to Stimmann’s successor, Senate Building Director Petra Kahlfeldt, who doesn’t seem to have found “her” topic yet. This may also have been due to the short term of office of the previous senate, to the new construction of the Molkenmarkt, which was handled anything but happily by the building authorities; or in Kahlfeldt’s demonstrative commitment to a replica of the Bauakademie facades, which is widely regarded as “conservative”.

Perhaps it is also worthwhile for Petra Kahlfeldt to take a look back politically, specifically to the times of her West Berlin predecessor, Hans Christian Müller, who co-initiated the internationally renowned International Building Exhibition around 1980. Actually, Müller was primarily concerned with pacifying an increasingly critical urban society and the “house fighters”. One of his answers was the “careful”, i.e. socially acceptable urban development, which is highly topical again in view of the immense need for renovation; another, just as topical, the “ecological urban redevelopment”.

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Both were debated around the world as models for the future, both downright forgotten in the neoliberal decades after the fall of the Berlin Wall under Hans Stimmann, when the main debate was on facades. But now it is time to rediscover the knowledge that was gained back then about dry toilets in the city center and wastewater treatment through courtyard ponds, efficient floor plans and building materials, the importance of green, light, air and sun, and social cohesion.

What speaks against letting the IBA 87 and its consequences, including its partial failure, become a topic at the Venice Architecture Biennale 2025? The investment should be worthwhile for the city, if only to fuel the somewhat lame architectural debates between “You’re conservative” and “You’re a very green person”.