Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Schneider, Bernhard

Titel

Berlin's centre: what shall there be?

Ist Teil von

• Journal of architecture (London, England), 1997, Vol.2 (3), p.225-233

Ort / Verlag

Taylor & Francis

Erscheinungsjahr

1997

Quelle

Taylor & Francis

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• In the last few years since the unification of the city, Berlin's former royal palace area in the historic centre has become a controversial subject of planning and design competitions and of private projects. The controversies reflect the difficulties of anchoring Berlin's present condition and its future expectations in a wider historic perspective. Nostalgic and superficial references to history through a reconstruction of parts of the palace's façade could only demonstrate and perpetuate the irrevocable loss of the past and the cultural resignation of the present. Basically, the problem is not one of design alternatives but about a contemporary equivalent for the big, ambitious and far-reaching ideas which dominated the place throughout its history. The appropriate question for an adequate 'republican project' for the capital's historic core should be: What can be achieved today that for 550 years the palace has prevented the city from doing? Who sets the tone? The restitution of public space to the public always was and will remain the central issue.