Architecture in Berlin: Schinkel, Bauhaus and the Reichstag

The architecture most worth seeing in Berlin is the Brandenburg Gate, Karl Friedrich Schinkel's Altes Museum and Schauspielhaus, Peter Behrens's turbine hall for AEG, Hans Scharoun's Philharmonie, Daniel Libeskind's Jewish Museum and Norman Foster's glass dome on the Reichstag. Berlin is unusually rich in two periods: the Prussian Neoclassicism of around 1800, which made the city an Athens on the Spree, and the time after the fall of the Wall in 1989, when Berlin became Europe's largest building site. Between them stand early Modernism and the divided city.

Facts

An Athens on the Spree: the Gate and Schinkel

The Brandenburg Gate was built in 1788–1791 by Carl Gotthard Langhans as the end of the boulevard Unter den Linden, modelled on the Propylaea of the Acropolis. It was one of the first buildings in Germany with an explicitly Greek model. The gate has twelve Doric columns, six on each side, but with bases and flutes, and is crowned by Johann Gottfried Schadow's quadriga. Napoleon took the quadriga to Paris in 1806, and in 1961–1989 the gate stood in no man's land at the Wall. It became first the symbol of divided Germany and then of reunification.

After the Napoleonic Wars Karl Friedrich Schinkel gave Berlin its classical centre. The Schauspielhaus on Gendarmenmarkt, 1818–1821, has an Ionic temple front but also a grid of slender pilasters and large windows that point forward. The Altes Museum, 1823–1830, one of the world's first public museums, has a colonnade with eighteen Ionic columns facing the Lustgarten and a rotunda modelled on the Pantheon. The opening of the museum turned the temples of antiquity into an image of education and public life. The period is covered under German Neoclassicism.

Schinkel's Traces in the Nordic Countries

Schinkel's pupil Friedrich August Stüler continued the work on Museum Island with the Neues Museum and then designed Nationalmuseum in Stockholm, opened in 1866. Carl Ludvig Engel, trained in Berlin, gave Helsinki a classical centre in the same spirit; see the guide to architecture in Helsinki. Swedish architects travelled to Berlin to see Schinkel's buildings, and the Nordic Classicism of the 1920s took up his severe formal language again.

Outside the city lies Potsdam with Frederick the Great's summer palace Sanssouci, 1745–1747, a single-storey Rococo palace at the top of a terraced vineyard. There Schinkel also designed country villas such as Charlottenhof. The whole classical line in Europe is described in the guide to Neoclassicism in architecture.

Modernism: the Turbine Hall and the Legacy of the Bauhaus

Peter Behrens was hired in 1907 by the electricity company AEG and designed everything from products and logos to buildings. His turbine hall in Moabit from 1909 is a temple to industry: steel arches and sloping glass walls on the long side, a polygonal gable facing the street and concrete corners that look like masonry although they carry no load. In Behrens's office in those years worked Walter Gropius, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Le Corbusier, and the hall became a school for Modernism.

Gropius founded the Bauhaus in Weimar in 1919, and in 1925 the school moved to Dessau, where he designed the Bauhaus building. The Nazis closed the Bauhaus in 1933, and Gropius and Mies moved to the USA. Mies returned to Berlin with the Neue Nationalgalerie, 1962–1968, a steel roof on eight columns; more in the guide to Mies van der Rohe. The period is described under German Modernism.

The Divided City

After the war Berlin was divided. In the east Stalinallee was built in the 1950s in a Socialist Classicism. In the west the Kulturforum was created right beside the Wall, and there Hans Scharoun built the Philharmonie, 1960–1963. He wanted to put the music at the centre: the orchestra plays near the middle of the hall and the audience sits around it on terraces that slope like vineyards. Outside, the building is a tent-like landscape of yellow, folded roofs, and the façade of gold-coloured aluminium came in the 1980s, following his original idea.

The vineyard-style hall became a model for concert halls all over the world, from Suntory Hall in Tokyo to the Elbphilharmonie in Hamburg. Organic Modernism, which built from the inside out according to the use of the space, is another path from Mies's straight glass boxes, and at the Kulturforum the two stand side by side.

After the Wall: the Dome and the Voids

The Reichstag building, the Reichstag, was built in 1884–1894 to designs by Paul Wallot. It burned in 1933, an event the Nazis used to abolish democracy, and was badly damaged in the war. When the Bundestag decided in 1991 to move to Berlin, Norman Foster won the competition for the conversion, 1995–1999. He preserved the façades but rebuilt the interior and gave the building a glass dome, where two spiral ramps lead visitors up above the debating chamber and a cone of mirrors directs daylight down. Citizens can literally look down on their representatives. Foster is regarded as the leading architect of High-Tech.

Daniel Libeskind's Jewish Museum in Kreuzberg, built 1992–1999, is a zigzag-shaped building clad in zinc, with windows that cut through the façade. Through the building run voids that cannot be entered, a sign of what was lost in the Holocaust. One enters through an underground passage from the old Baroque building next door. The building is often counted as Deconstructivism. Both buildings appear under contemporary German architecture, and the whole German thread under German architectural history.

A Walk Through Berlin

Most of the buildings lie close together. Begin at the Reichstag and go up into the dome, continue a few hundred metres south to the Brandenburg Gate and follow Unter den Linden east, then turn south to Gendarmenmarkt and the Schauspielhaus. At the far end of Unter den Linden lie the Lustgarten and the Altes Museum on Museum Island. The Philharmonie lies at Potsdamer Platz on the edge of the Tiergarten, and the Jewish Museum in Kreuzberg. The turbine hall in Moabit and Sanssouci in Potsdam need a trip of their own. All are on the map, and the map below shows them coloured by period.

Berlin's Architecture in Brief

Exercise

Which ancient building was the model for the Brandenburg Gate?