Berlin. ARCHITECTURAL REBIRTH AFTER THE WALL

After the collapse of the wall, Berlin became the center of contemporary architecture.

by Fabio Massimo Penna

“Well the other character have the signs of landscape, which express the will of the defense, or separation of human groups. Insecurity, fear, and hate, that generate these signs.” (Silvio Piccardi, Foundations of cultural geography, Patron editore, Bologna, 1994). In this wretched category of the symbols of hatred is part of the wall that until a few years ago it has divided in two Berlin, a wound in the heart of the city, with the eighteenth-century Brandenburg Gate, became, despite himself, the emblem of the division of the German people. Families and friends separated until the fall of the berlin wall, with an explosion of life that has cancelled a barrier capable of keep away the bodies, not the minds and hearts. In 1989, with the collapse of the Berlin wall, the world changes, ends an era of conflicts and cold wars, and begins the era of a globalized society. The rebirth of Berlin, finally united, through to the architecture, which sees a large group of “superstar” to act to give a new face to the city. The architectural past of Berlin had already been subjected to severe mutilation in the course of time as the destruction of the Castle, the Civic took place in 1950 or that of the golden gallery in the Charlottenburg Castle during the second world war. Great protagonist of the architecture of the German city was was in the Eighteenth century, Georg Wenceslaus von Knobelsdorff , who worked for Frederick the Great, combining elements of palladio trends to traditional and was the author of the Theatre of the Court (1741), in the eastern wing of the Castle of Charlottenburg (1740) and Theatre Work (1741-43).

Following the unification of East and West Berlin to the need for transformation with respect to the past results in a considerable boost of construction that attracts in the German city some of the architects of the international level. Here are some of the many interventions carried out. Let's start from the construction of the dome of the Reichstag, the work done by Norman Foster, the representative of the tip of the architecture high tech. The size high tech of his works is characterized by the performance of the components of the architectural structure, usually of steel or reinforced concrete, and the use of coatings of transparent and homogeneous, frequently the glass. Obviously can not miss a look at technical progress and its products. The scaffolding of the dome, Foster's is formed by a metal skeleton covered by a glass coating, a lightweight construction and elegant overlooking Berlin. The architect of Manchester opts to make viable the structure allowing the audience to observe members of parliament in the performance of their functions. The project also takes into account issues related to the ecology, with systems of natural ventilation, and photovoltaic batteries powered by solar energy.

Also notable is the intervention of Frank O. Gehry, whose poetics involves overcoming architectural traditions to arrive at a conciliation of opposites that involves the coexistence of rational and irrational elements, full and empty, linear and arched. This theoretical basis innervats a revolutionary project like the one for the DZ Bank Building in Berlin, in which the interweaving of the lines of the structures is contradicted by the judisation in the interior space of a conference room with a destabilizing appearance, in the shape of a horse, which marks a detachment decided by the previous architectural tradition for the deflagration of a free and boisterous fantasy.

Architect Jean Nouvel creates the Galerie Lafayette on Friedrichstrasse. Nouvel's poetry is based on the constant crossover of tradition and modernity, of technology and nature, transparent and opaque in an architectural conception in which the Renaissance is combined with high tech. The personal style, however, does not neglect the pre-existing, the context in which the artist lowers his works. The Galerie Lafayette in Berlin is a modern and visionary construction, a typical department store architecture in which the rounded elements are grafted onto the linear ones and to which a glass cover gives transparency and lucidity. Characteristic of the stained glass is to return, like a mirror, the images of the other buildings of Friedrichstrasse reflected on its surface.

Redesign a legendary place, bring back to life a nerve center engulfed by an enveloping void. Renzo Piano,called to revitalize an iconic site such as the Potsdamer Platz in Berlin, realizes a project that involves the reconstruction of an area of the city with the construction of offices, cinemas, shops, hotels, houses and green areas. The comparison with Berlin's great past requires an urban recovery that takes into account the classic arrangement of the city's blocks and the pre-existing historical. Piano creates a series of buildings, including the Imax cinema, culminating in a ceramic sphere, the Atrium tower (formerly called Torre Debis) and the transparent splinter of the B1 office building. Potsdamer Platz also sees the intervention, to create office buildings, of Arata Isozaki whose architecture is based on the use of elementary geometric shapes often declined in the sense of an intense monumentality.