Condition: Berlin - Adolfo del Valle

CONDITION: BERLIN Der Großturm

Condition: Berlin Der Großturm "The essential thing in the whole business is the idea of building a tower that will reach to heaven. In comparison with that

idea everything else is secondary. The idea, once seized in its magnitude, can never vanish again; so long as there are men on the earth there will be also the irresistible desire to complete the building." - Franz Kafka, Stadtwappen, 1920 "Zu leben, ist es eine Form zu verteidigen..." -Friedrich Hölderlin

Die Flamme In 1871, the story has it, Ms. O’leary’s cow knocked over a gas lantern while being milked and ignited some nearby hay. This in turn ignited and destroyed large portions of Chicago. In the aftermath over 100,000 thousand wood construction homes and buildings along with 300 of their inhabitants were devoured by the flames. It was one of harshest city planning lessons learned, and from it Chicago would rebuild and reinvent the construction of buildings. Chicago focused swiftly at recreating its city as an indigestible one. No longer would the buildings themselves be material catalysts to catastrophe.

Chicago would rebuild in strong and resilient steel and iron. The convergence of elevator technologies and steal construction st methods led to the new and everlasting perpetual symbol of 20/21 century cities: the Skyscraper. Built within the manic pace of Chicago’s reconstruction, in 1884 and towering over the city at 10 stories tall the Home Insurance Building by architect William Le Baron Jenney was widely and officially christened the world’s first skyscraper (plate 1). The building type seemed to instil the city with a modern wonderment, putting the mythologizing effects of a Great Pyramid right into the corner of North LaSalle and West Kinzie Street. Variations on the Skyscraper (none as tall as the Home insurance building) would spread like the Chicago fire, standing at various points all across the metropolitan USA; like torches guiding the nationand truly the world-to a new brighter, better and bigger urban future.

However, these sacred flames took time to manifest in Europe. By 1920 the New York Metropolis of Manhattan had constructed roughly 20 high-rises and Chicago not far behind. While England's Royal Liver Building dominated the European skyline as the tallest storied building until the early 30’s (plate 2). Simply put this was because compared to nearly all American cities, European capitals were shaped by historical urban master plans and strategies which left less room for reinvention and devoting more time to controlled coherence. It was not until the early 20’s that the Berlin Großstadt soon heir1 apparent to the Americanism of Chicago , had nurtured the unique spark of its urban growth to an internal fire burning for the great American Monument. The Skyscraper for Berlin would come about in the same way as those in America, both on the practical and urban level. Much Like the ‘history-less’ affinities to the American metropolis, Berlin didn’t so much lack a history but instead it always reinvented it. ‘The Capital of what?’ This was the question that constantly reoriented urban priorities and conditions, Berlin’s great fires came in political upheaval rather than barn animal mishaps.

Das Kapitell Berlin in the year 1921 is placed 3 years after the Great War, 3 years since the death of the Second German Reich and 3 years into the new German state, a democratic republic, the city settles into its role as the American city in Europe.

With its U-bahn 20 years young and tram ways 30 years in operation, Berlin was now an interconnected city with its own bourgeoning periphery that had formed around the mid-1800s (plate 3). Where the city of Berlin experienced a boom in industry and a flood of labourers into the city. This territorial expansion, despite numerous efforts from Imperial architects to 1

Eisenschmidt, Alexander, (2013). Chicagoisms: The City as Catalyst for Architectural speculation, Zurich: Park Books

master plan a New Berlin, was a chaotic land grab directed by social class rather than urban strategy. Berlin had previously grown center out up until the mid-19th century creating the Wilhelmine Ring that enclosed the old pre-industrial Berlin now Museumsinsel. The Wilhelmine ring was made of dense and compact districts. Such urban conditions were not suited for the new emerging wealth that sought to carve out its own piece of Berlin. Money formed sporadic villas in south west outskirts of the greater Berlin area, claiming enormous amount of land for single estates (plate 3). The exact opposite occurred with the new working class Berliners who sought refuge in the more northern and eastern (undesirable) parts of Berlin in what was then known as Mietshauses, where as many as 13 packed themselves into a single heated room. The Exodus and its accompanying Großness (largeness in respect to population size) created the first iteration of one of Berlin’s most important 2 urban mechanisms: the Berlin tenement block, better known as the Mietskaserne . The Mietskaserne would come to dominate Berlins urban fabric solidified by the 1868 Horbrecht plan (plate 4) which fitted roads around the existing Mietshauses and allowed for space for and the perpetuation of the new barrack like housing type. This perpetuation was to be mirrored in the pragmatic gesture of the Manhattan (metropolitan) skyscraper where plot would equal profit, with architecture as an immediate conduit. For the Mietskaserne was a cold calculation of Plot(People)=Profit in response to the constant influx of labourers as wealthy landlords began to maximize the yield of their plots. Ultimately the stone faced housing type would cover large portions of the Berlin ground; working off the Horbrecht plan its spread gave insufferable stony flatness to Berlin (plate 5). This would be a harsh lessoned learned about the wildfire like spread of immediate profit driven architecture. th But as the city grew in the early years of the 20 century housing would no longer be the only prime commodity in architecture. When the Republic was proclaimed in 1919, Berlin saw itself now as a commercial capital as well as symbolic one and as such its architecture would need to now negotiate the continuing worker influx (and resulting its housing shortage) and the need for large amounts of commercial and industrial spaces.

Das Kapital Berlin at the time also had no high rise, tower block, or skyscraper and the Turmhaus AG sought to capitalize on what would 3 be a new novel typology-along with the financial gains that come with it . Turmhaus AG (Aktionar der Geselltschaft) was a 4 share holding company that was in essence a developer and investor . It bore its mission as its name and was Berlin’s first organized institution that called and commissioned for a Berlin Skyscraper. The intentions were clear, the competition was not an elaborate urban experiment but rather a pragmatic move to follow a very successful real estate model, and it was not only architects that had a keen eye towards the American metropolis. The staging of Turmhaus’s ‘Der Schrei nach dem’ (the cry for the) first Berlin high rise was spearheaded by wealth management bankers who owned a large portion of the company 5 and hired Architects who saw a less profit driven potential for this new urban gesture . But if the main proponents for this new type of building in Berlin saw only the potential for monopoly and profit why then have the competition at all, why not follow the American model of pure extrusion? Because in the end the investors still required planning permission from the state and at this time in Berlin the practice of urban indifference by large cooperate real estate entities had not yet become the norm. In fact it is evident from the competition entries that there was a meticulous engagement with this new type of tall building in the city. Exigencies aside, the Turmhaus AG did not have the power or interest in a tabula rasa approach for their new building. The press generated by the competition and the involvement of the Architectural Community (at least the BDA, Bund Deutscher Architekten, the Union of German Architects Berlin branch), would ensure wider acceptance for this new entity in the city. Yet the seeming straight forward purpose of the competition resulted in the complete transformation of this building type just as it was being developed as a metropolitan (American) strategy. Those involved directly and in directly with

2

Bodenschatz, Harald. , (2010) Berlin Urban Design: A Brief History. Berlin, Germany: DOM

3

Bruognolo, Bruno, Dudda M., Gerd, Hardt, Heike, et. al, Der Schrei nach dem Turmhaus: Der Indeenwettbewerb Hochhaus am Bahnhof Friedrichstrasse Berlin 1921/1922 (Berlin: Argon 1989) pg.29-31

4

Ibid.,

5

Ibid.,

the competition, either through writing or drawing, would mould the Skyscraper into a new phase of development speculating its possibilities within the context of the Berlin Großstadt. But where to put it?

Grundstück Turmhaus AG had chosen a site for its convenience (plate 6,7). An empty plot at the north end of Friedrichstraße, stone’s throw away from one of the largest and busiest Bahnhofs of Berlin, the Friedrichstraße Banhof which Turmhaus AG required entries to have a direct link to- via elevator and underground passage. After leaving the Friedrichstraße Bahnhof and heading south along Friedrichstraße one could see a myriad of cinemas and theatres on the buzzing entertainment street. The plot was surrounded on one side the Spree on one side by the train station and on the other by the endless facades of stony Berlin. The site was a poetic leftover of Berlin’s lenient urbanism, half plot- half void. Circulated with the competition materials were two aerial photographs showing the site not as empty but as host to a carnival, small tents where loomed over by the swirls of a wood and metal roller coaster. Perhaps this is a piece of inception, for what the competition asked for 6 was to fill the site with various commercial activities - what activities aren’t?- and instil an urban dynamism that the architecture would help facilitate. It was to be a uniform but adhoc enterprise much like the Mietskaserne: stone faced in stable form, the rental barracks hid the subdivided and chaotic mash of living spaces inside. So too would the new skyscraper, its irreverent gesture answered the call of profit as well as form and proportion, and it would be up to the architects of the Großstadt to negotiate pragmatic profitism with the capital city’s growing Großness.

Dem Berlinen Volk A bulky 144 entries attempted to negotiate the triangular plot allocated (plate 8,9). Information was scarce and program was dense. The brief was strict in the representation of the buildings drawings, as it wanted clarity over experimentation. All submissions required a black on white (or yellow trace) aesthetic, clear line drawings with few rendered views. The entries were to be displayed in the town hall, the drawings could then be used as a tool of communication by the 7 Turmhaus AG . They could in their own sober way, seduce the public into the possibilities of the Skyscraper.

These possibilities would manifest as an extension of the Berlin. The extension is evident in the vocal nature of architects such as Adolf Behne who of the competition writes, “…it will not be for us, here, to follow the Americans. The 8 difference for us here is not so much in the formal aspects as over the relation of the tower to its setting.” Behne saw the 9 tower as an “urban planning issue” ultimately “an ethical issue” . Other such as Bruno Möhring spoke of skyscrapers in Berlin 10 as stadtkrone (city crown, musing on Berlin’s strange status as a global city, Möhring saw the Skyscraper as embodying a more commercially involved and global Berlin. The Skyscraper as commercial space, was advocated from the financial sector 11 as well as the housing sector. Martin Machler saw these tall buildings as providing much needed space for housing by absorbing the commercial program of the city offices no longer had to vie for the same space as homes. For the Berlin Großstadt the skyscraper was not a matter of simple formula but rather a stark negotiation of urban forces. This is apparent 6

Ibid., pg.37-38

7

Ibid.,

8

Adolf Behne, “Der Wettbewerb de Turmhaus-Gesellschaft”, Wasmuths Monatshefte fur baukunst 7 (1922-23), pg. 58-67.

Translated by Micheal Loughridge.

9

Ibid.,

10 Bruno Mohring, Uber die Vorzuge de Turmhauser und die Voraussetzungen unter denen sie in Berlin genaut warden konnen: Vortag in der Preussischen Akademie de Bauwesens am 22 (Berlin: Zirkel Architekturverlag, 1921), pg. 2. Translated by Iain Boyd Whyte.

11

IbidMartin Machler, “Zum problem des Wolkenkratzers,” Wasmuths Monatshefte fur Baukunst 5 (1920-21), pg.191-205, 206-73.

Translated by Micheal Loughridge.

in one form or another with some of the more sophisticated entries. Through these entries one can observe the process in which the Großstadt develops its own type of skyscraper through the void, the volume and the view.

Void Through the array of stone housing facades lie the voids of Berlin’s inner spaces and courtyards. When Martin Elässer an architect from Cologne, approached the site he embedded the same block logic to his entry (plate 10). Indeed one of the larger bolder proposals, Elässer’s main formal negotiation is not seen from the outside of the building but like the Mietskaserne is experienced within the building. The central void of the proposal not only solves the ethical dilemma of naturally lighting the deep spaces within the large building but also in plan accentuates the additive approach to program.

Paradoxically the voids openness to natural light reorients the need for lobbies from being on the street side of the building into more internal lobbies. The buildings space are unconventional by contemporary standards and its more inward looking served spaces emphasize the largeness of the overall scheme.

But this notion of a central void has its inverse in another entry by Walter Fischer (plate 11); the formal gesture of enclosure is reversed to the gesture of center out organization. The building now has a central tower and three cascading appendages that meet the corners of the site. Oddly enough as was a trend with most entries, Fischer’s entry has a serious of smaller ground level volumes that in plan connect but visually seem like that are nestled in the looming spaces defined by the proposals ‘arms’. Yet the best use of the Void is in the winning entry of the competition by Hans Scharoun (plate 12), the architect who would design the Berlin Philharmonic. The void for Scharoun was a hole that punctured through the site splitting the building masses from each other and completely opening the site. The void for Scharoun is a gesture of composition. His entry is anything but an object, it’s in fact a composition. The delegation of form to program to volume to site breaks down the objectness of most American skyscrapers and creates almost a mini-Rockefellar center using the density of program to fill the site with strategic forms and volumes.

Volume The program for the skyscraper was varied. The competition called for the building to contain parking garages, workshops, offices, cinemas, ground floor store front shops, cafes, public spaces, studios, and more. For entries like those of Fischer and Elässer’s program was organized through shape and volume. The buildings are amalgamations of program volumes, Elässer’s entry being the most pronounced of the two. Volume however is not just an exercise in terraced forms but it can be a smoothing over of the built spaces. Hugo Häring’s very expressionist entry is among the best examples of this (plate 13). Häring’s building consolidates its volumes into very beautiful and resolved forms. The program is then experienced (and only read in plan) but the building retains a stark exterior cohesion. Another expressionistic entry and one that followed a similar layout to Fischer’s entry is that of Hans Poelzig (plate 14). Poelzig’s skyscraper is one of the more resolute of the entries, establishing a clear and controlled visual language and site foot print. This resoluteness is mastered just the same in plan, as he renders each plan with a different spatial configuration around its basic form. The street plan is cut by walkways and passaged, while upper level plans go from open plan to successive rooms. Poelzig develops a very versatile design all the while avoiding the explicit formal cluster and terraced forms of someone like Fischer. Surprisingly Häring is not far from the language Mies employs for the exterior reading of his building. In Häring and Mies one can see there entries as extrusions with the emphasis on their total form, or volume but the façade treatment is radically different.

View An important aspect of the submission requirements and an aspect also implicit in the design approach to the large building are its view and how it sits in its context. All entries were required to submit rendered views from certain specified points on the site. This constrained the design of the building in subtle ways. Given that there was no other higher point to view the building; the views were of street level, an explicit incorporation of the human scale in the urban context. Most views projected a distant grandeur and perspectives were exaggerated. Oddly enough the most inaccurate perspective and the most recognizable view of the competition come from Mies van der Rohe’s entry (plate 15). Mies was disqualified because his

drawings were unclear and the renders were taking from views other than those asked for. Mies saw his entry not as a possible commission but as an exercise in developing a new architectural type. Mies images of his unrealized skyscraper have become not only the image of skyscraper archetype, but also one of the most severe cases of a building and idea as a publication. The image is ripped from its context and placed into the dominate context of today’s modernist historiography.

Formlosigkeit Mies, as foretold, extrudes the plot with a stiff Manhattan upper lip cladding his building in the ghostly material of glass, pristine and seldom comprehended by the heavy charcoal renders that have come to embody the memory of the competition. Because- it was thought- Berlin was like all other cities Mies intervention fits perfectly into modern world Spirit th that was blowing through 20 century cities like a developer savvy to the next wave of gentrification, this Miesian Geist would indulge the platonic narrative of the international style and give a pre-proto-neo-ultra precedent to the slab and glass diagram of the modern skyscraper. However, Berlin was not a metropolis like any other and this reading of Modern skyscraper is a fib. Miesian Memories of this important competition were as forced as the perspective in his render, a beautiful lie.

Mies van der Rohe’s entry is possibly the most unique out of all the entries. Like a slick modernist tower of Babel, it certainly has received the same mythology. The basic gesture of Mie’s skyscraper has roots in the Manhattan skyscraper but for Mies it is the initial idea of neutral space, where program is secondary to form and his intent on covering his entry in only th glass that give it such a unique look. In the common place Modernist Historiography, Mie’s entry is the 20 century index of the skyscraper, countless variations on his theme were to follow and the metropolis architecture, and especially its commercial towers, would become synonymous with Mie’s Friedrichstrasse skyscraper. Yet this hi jack of Mie’s images by the contemporary modernist historiography comes from the assumption that because Mies entry is the most unique out of all the others it had a different trajectory from the forces at work in the competition. In fact the opposite is true. Mie’s skyscraper is not Metropolis architecture; it is the essence of Großstadt Sobriety in the wake of Metropolitan Crapulence.

Stadt und Polis Stadt in German contains a certain ambiguity in whether it means city or town. As a very literal, almost meaningless, translation Großstadt can mean Metropolis as they both speak to a certain threshold of population. But now Berlin requires a redefining of Großstadt, in order to tease out the operatives and exigencies of building types blindly absorbed into the modernist historiography. Such a redefinition can be reached through the examination of Weimar Berlin’s most telling cinematic urban portraits. In 1927 out of the rich and dense artistic movements of Weimar Berlin, two films are released that frame, better than most architects the two types of Weltstadt (world cities) emerging in the Post-Great War era. Berlin: Die Sinfonie der Großstadt, by Walter Ruttmann (partly trained as an architect) and the other Metropolis, directed by Fritz Lang.

Film becomes a powerful tool in the examination of cities as it was for Benjamin, who saw it as ‘exploding this prison-world [of monotonous urban experience] with the dynamics of the split second’. Films bring to the fore an entirely different view of a city previous intangible. This becomes even more apparent in Sinfonie which is film portrait of the city itself, not a narrative of an experience. Metropolis employs a different but powerful trope of predictive symbolism and an almost prescriptive tone to an imagined urban future. It is through these two films, Sinfonie (a type of Cinéma vérité) and Metropolis (a Cinematic Fantasy with an all too familiar architecture) that a sketch of the Berlin Großstadt and how it differs from contemporary Metropolis can arise.

Routine Berlin: Die Sinfonie der Großstadt (plate 15 screenshots), brings to the fore a type of actualization of Berlin. Its 5 acts stitch together a picture of the city in a rich soviet-montage manner. Its motif of trains and street cars conveys the

12

deeply entrenched motion and circulation that would transform and dominate the mode of experiencing Berlin as a whole.

The city in the 1920s was often seen by some through pragmatic and technological tint which led some to compare it “in th contrast to Paris, the capital of aesthetic modernity in the 19 century, [Berlin] center of technological, civilizing 13 modernity.” Yet to others it was ‘parvenu and provincial by comparison with the more established European capitals, yet Americanized and radically modern by comparison with the German Provinces…’ Berlin is American insomuch as it simply had the space and lacked the ‘historical baggage’ of other European cities which allowed it to internalize the new global economy and the urban mechanism that come with it- responding to class and development. Sabine Hake reads Sinfonie through the lense of class, which helps her to point out the most powerful aspect of the film: it brings to bear said new economic forces and renders them in a sort of real time. This real time view allows contemporary urban forces like mechanization, routine, flow, 14 social class and more to come to the surface of ones reading of Berlin. Ultimately the film presents an urban organism that functions much like a large, ever working machine. Today places such as La Defense in Paris and The City of London stand for commercial and global economies dictating the form of their respective urban situations, Sinfonie is no different, in fact it benefits from being (then) a new medium able to at once objectively and subjectively capture the same economic and technological mechanisms that would lead to present day financial districts. Thus Berlin, like an American Metropolis, was part of the same global economic change that tied markets to one another and required new forms of urban works. However at the time of Sinfonie Berlin had yet to build by these processes, because Berlin ultimately functioned as a different urban entity. Berlin, unlike American Metropolises, used said mechanism as speculation points as it reimagined not only what the was at stake with these new mechanism but what was at stake for the city itself building only integrated and negotiated buildings that were more Berlin than some sort of commercial representation. Sinfonie then helps elaborate how the Großstadt functions, because its urban appearance in many ways concealed such mechanisms. The American metropolis had been already been created, and it was evolving rapidly since 1880s but the Berlin Großstadt had just begun.

Spektakel “A metropolis? On Potsdamerplatz, my dears, you can hear the chickens clucking.” (FOOTNOTE) Metropolis(4,5) (plate 16)was, as an urban snapshot, the opposite of Sinfonie. Where Sinfonie helps to convey the socio-economic mechanism of the Berlin Großstadt and at once shows their limited effect on the architectural development of urban space, Metropolis elaborates on the condition of a city developing extreme architectures, as a direct translation of extreme mechanisms. Metropolis exaggerates the global economic forces taking hold in Berlin and New York in the 1920sinevitably highlighting the burden bore by the working class in the new global economy. But the sheer spectacle that is Metropolis is in the fact that the city in the film is a kind of Manhattan run rampant: much like Harvey Wiley Corbetts images of City of the Future done in 1910 (plate 16). Manhattan’s socio economic conditions had created the ‘alibi’ of business which placed the skyscraper as an urban operation both legitimate and inevitable. (rem) Manhattans blocks in theory were all susceptible to the actualization of its socio economic mechanism; each block was an ‘envelope’ merely waiting for the tide of commerce to fill well defined parameters. In Metropolis a city of great class divided driven by extreme labour and economic conditions, shows how the height and spectacle of the Metropolis ultimately represents (a sci-fi level) the workings of the Manhattan Skyscraper. Manhattan, much like the metropolis of the film, has its architecture formed by and is an urban appendage to the new economic and social structure of the growing city. The metropolis is the promise of the privileged classes. The new capitalist industrial and financial economies of the world’s leading capital cities concentrate wealth and culture into already congested areas, seemingly necessitating the need for a new architecture. Aided by coherent master plans such as the 1906 zoning law, an aesthetic uniformity is embedded within a city. Once the city inherits the more modern 12

Whyte, Iain Boyd, and David Frisby. "Planning the World City." Metropolis Berlin: 1880-1940. N.p.: n.p., n.d. N. pag. Print.

13

Whyte, Iain Boyd, and David Frisby. "The Metropolitan Panorama." Metropolis Berlin: 1880-1940. N.p.: n.p., n.d. N. pag. Print.

14

Hake, Sabine (2008). Reconstructing Modern Subjectivity: On Berlin, Symphony of the Big City. In Topographies of class modern architecture and mass society in Weimar Berlin. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

political and economic concentrations of a country, reflecting them at the urban scale as an ‘immediate architecture’, then a Metropolis is forged. These skyscraper spectacles are thus the gluttony of a city dictated by economic growth. In Metropolis this gluttony is a sin worn as cinematic spectacle which leads, like many other symbolic ‘sins’ in the movie, to conflict. The issue of class aside however, illustrates the simple contrast between the Metropolis and the Großstadt: the level of economic digestion. The metropolis consumes and in turn is consumed, architecture the direct extension of the city’s economic forces, seemingly determinist and admirably pragmatic, the Großstadt is a dense filter of (in many cases) the very same forces but their effect on the architecture is reversed, it is now the architecture of the Großstadt that begins to speculate how it can affect said forces in the city.

Veritgo At the time of the Turmhaus AG competition, the metropolitan skyscraper had captured the minds and intellect of European architects. The skyscraper had come from a history of fantastical building types that took liberties in announcing how the future urban condition would be like. The scale of the skyscraper brings architecture back to the idea of monument. The enterprise of course has its roots in the architecture of Étienne-Louis Boullée who was arguably the first to place the word 15 monument in the context of a public architecture (plate 17). In Boullée s ‘public’ concept of architecture, through its program and form, become a variable first step towards new conception of urban monumentality. This new conceptualization of the role of form and program as an urban gesture is predicated on the preference for ‘ideal’ driven tectonics. Boullée’s cenotaph expresses a void wherein the program of remembrance becomes one of the idea not the scientist. It’s a monument to the ideal of science as public space gives the same almost liberal intentions as Le Serment du Jeu de paume by JacquesLouis David a few years later (plate 17). Architecture of a certain magnitude now had the capacity to shape and form ideals, this initial humanist effect will manifest itself into the ideals of an economic system as well as the ideal of splendour. The 16 evolution of the architecture of ‘ideal’ happens between Boullée the automonument clusters that reshaped the urban experience of manhattans mid-town and financial district. The first major transformation is the adoption of machine and technological aesthetic brought about by polarizing Parisian tower by Gustave Eiffel (plate 18). The Eiffel tower signalled a th new vertical frontier of the coming 20 centuries machine aesthetic and became an almost phenomenological example of architectures capacity to re-orient the fabric of a city, to capture and almost zeitgeist like force and give it form. At once capturing and changing the mechanism that bore the Architectural gesture in the first place.

Only a decade after the 10 storied Home Insurance building in Chicago, Louis Bonnier would propose a building part skyscraper part spectacle for a Paris Expo (plate 19). The buildings hubris is unmatched. An enormous model of the world itself, sits at the center of an enormous ramp that brings the city up and around the globe. The building is enormous; it’s at once a monument but in no way a ruin. Like the Coney Island Globe Tower proposed in 1907, there is an architectural logic within these two speculations that is wholly modern(plate 20). The significance of the proto-Skyscraper for Europe becomes an almost Piranesi like project of historicising the new building type. In 1910 Eugène Hénard, “Cities of the Future” for the RIBA’s Town Planning Conference London, was a drawing for a new age of architectural reinvention. Like the Piranesi plan of Campo Marzo (plate 21,22), the ground is a collage of urban European monuments all dwarfed by an almost machinist interpretation of the Skyscraper, European in its insistence on historical motifs, the drawing does help bring to the fore the new perspective based architectural object. The skyscraper is seldom understood in plan and its intrinsic urban qualities are unreadable in section or elevation. Its perspectives that gives the enormity of the skyscrapers effect. Hénard image helps to succinctly encapsulates the environment of the European proto-skyscraper and the mania of large buildings. A decade after with still only the liver building acting as Europe’s ambassador of tall buildings, Berlin would indefinitely reinvent the metropolitan skyscraper and its European speculation into an international architectural standard.

15

Aureli, Pier Vittorio (2011). Architecture as a State of Exception; Étienne-Louis Boullée's Project for a Metropolis. In The possibility of an absolute architecture. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.

16

Koolhaas, Rem (1994). Delirious New York: A retroactive manifesto for Manhattan (New ed.). New York: Monacelli Press.

Der Großturm For Mies as for those involved in the Turmhaus AG competition, the skyscraper has an intricate urban manoeuvre.

Whether formal or a composite of forms and program it was run through the filters of Großstadt urban mechanism. The towers proposed for the competition nearly all sought to use the architecture as an urban gesture not only tied to the city as whole but to the immediate context of the site. Pure extrusion was not the default design move for nearly all entries but instead and variation of Void, Volumes and Views shaped and made evident the reading of the Großstadt for the architects; the starkest reading being that of Mies. Mies could be read as the entry that sticks after the 143 experiments resolve themselves to the Großstadt. Mie’s glass building is one of pure form, material, and plan. Nothing is left hidden and nothing is left for speculation, whether of an international architecture or as a ‘german architecture (as in the case of Otto Kohtz) (plate 2325). This extreme Großstadt Sobriety would be what will lead to the international style of glass towers. Mies skyscraper language would be honed and exported back to Chicago as well as New York. The Großstadt like the America Metropolis was capable of exporting a new kind of Architecture. The skyscraper had gone to Berlin and left a completely different entity. To read Mies as somehow exempt from the general effort of the Turmhaus competitors is an arbitrary tale in Modernist th Historiography. It overlooks not only the real evolution of the 20 century’s most spectacular architectural creation but also the contribution of cities themselves on architecture. The logic is clear; Mies is a product of the Großstadt, the second generation of International Style skyscrapers are a product of Mies. The Berlin Großstadt had refined an exported an architectural object that would come to define the world’s major cities to this day. The glass skyscraper up till now has had a false genealogy, Mies the savoir amongst the clumsy nobodies simply vying for a commission, when in reality those who answered the call for Berlin’s first skyscraper did so as a reinvention of the American skyscraper to the Berlin Großturm. A Großturm whether all glass or stone borne out of condition Berlin.

Nachtrag Though there was a winner in the competition, Turmhaus AG did not bring about the Turmhaus for Berlin. In 2006 the site was finally filled by what at first was to be a skyscraper but ended up being cut in half. The Spreedreieck by Mark Braun Architects, ultimately represents the present dangers of a closed historiography for the skyscraper (plate 26). The efforts of the Berlin architects during the Turmhaus AG competition was overshadowed by Mies who was then hi-jacked by most international style narratives, which read flatly the skyscraper as a mere expression of commerce. Assigned with a selffulfilling prophecy of derisive failure, the skyscraper has fallen far from the ambition of many who sought to recreate it as a more urban gesture of a changing city. The Großturm as developed by Mies and company brings a level of criticality sorely 17 missing from the practice of skyscrapers today. Even in the years after the competition architects such as Hilberseimer saw how the import for the Skyscraper into the European context, could ‘remedy’ the short comings of the American Skyscraper. Today there is a mass short coming of the skyscraper typology, an infallible disappointment with the building type. What is needed today is another Großturm, what is needed is to turn once again the critical eye towards the world’s great cities, especially in the case of Berlin. In the end this paper was only able to give a sketch of the potentials of a new Berlinism , the re-examination of architectural types brought about by the most historically and creatively dynamic city in the world. Pressing forward with the line of architectural inquiry that is Berlinism , one will likely find how the city and its th architectural epochs are the de facto index for 20 century architecture.

17

Hilberseimer, Luwig, & Anderson, Richard (2012). High-Rises. In Metropolisarchitecture and selected essays. New york, New york: GSAPP Books.

Plate 1

Home Insurance Building by William Le Baron Jenney

Plate 2

Royal Liver Building by Walter Aubrey Thomas

Plate 3 Urban ring-like spread of Berlins outter districts

Mietshaus, early Urban blocks of a just industrialized berlin

More plot driven Mietskaserne block.

Circa 1860

Plate 4 The Horbrecht Road and Plot Plan circa 1858 (bottom) Skyview of Mietskasernes circa 1910’s (rigth)

Plate 5

Mietskaserne Blocks spread across Berlin late 1890s (top) and 1910’s (bottom)

Plate 6

site

Plate 7 Friedrichstrasse circa 1920s (right) F.Strasse Banhof Station (center) Station Drawings (bottom)

Plate 8

Assorted Competition Entries (plans)

Plate 9

Assorted Competition Entries (perspectives)

Plate 10

Entry by Martin El채sser

A

B

C

Plate 11

Entry by Walter Fischer

A

B

Plate 12

Entry by Hans Scharoun

A

B

C

Plate 13 Entry by Hugo Haring

A

B

Plate 14

Entry by Hans Poelzig

A

B

Plate 15 Entry by Mies van der Rohe

A

B

C

Plate 15

Berlin: Die Sinfonie der GroĂ&#x;stadt

Plate 16

City of the Future by Harvey Wiley Corbett, 1913

Metropolis, screen shots, Central Building (top) Urban Density and Traffic Vectors (bottom)

Plate 17

Assorted Competition Entries (perspectives)

Assorted Competition Entries (perspectives)

Plate 18

Assorted Competition Entries (perspectives)

Plate 19

Louis Bonnier, Globe Building,

A

Plate 20

Globe Tower for Coney island

B

Plate 21

C

Plate 22

A

Plate 23

Otto Kohtz: Early attempts at the ‘German Skyscraper’ 1920

Plate 24

Otto Kohtz, Reichhaus Konigsplatz Proposal A

Plate 25

Kemnitz, Floating Tower Homes, 1921 B

Plate 26

Spreedreieck; Proposal for high rise on site by Mark Braun Architects around 2007 (top left). Mies van der RoheF. Strasse Proposal, 1921 ( top right). Present Day situation with trimmed top left proposal (bottom)

Bibliography: Aureli, Pier Vittorio. The possibility of an absolute architecture. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2011.

Bodenschatz, Harald. Berlin Urban Design: A Brief History. Berlin, Germany: DOM, 2010.

Bruognolo, Bruno, Dudda M., Gerd, Hardt, Heike, et. Al. Der Schrei nach dem Turmhaus: Der Indeenwettbewerb Hochhaus am Bahnhof Friedrichstrasse Berlin 1921/1922 , Berlin: Argon, 1989.

Eisenschmidt, Alexander. Chicagoisms: The City as Catalyst for Architectural speculation, Zurich: Park Books. 2013 Hake, Sabine. Topographies of class modern architecture and mass society in Weimar Berlin. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2008.

Koolhaas, Rem. Delirious New York: A retroactive manifesto for Manhattan (New ed.). New York: Monacelli Press, 1994.

Geist, Johann Friedrich., and Klaus KuĚˆrvers. Das Berliner Mietshaus. Vol. 1. MuĚˆnchen: Prestel, 1980.

Hilberseimer, Luwig, & Anderson, Richard. Metropolisarchitecture and selected essays. New york, New york: GSAPP Book, 2012.

Whyte, Ian Boyd and Frisby, David. Metropolis Berlin 1880-1940, University of California Press: Berkeley, 2012.

Image References:

Plate 1: Chicago Daily Tribune, Nov. 22, 1931. in Wordpress, < https://johndcramer.files.wordpress.com/2012/10/1931-11-22_chicagodaily-tribune_home-insurance-building-demolition1.jpg>, accessed 20 March. 2015.

Chicago Architectural Photographing Company, Home Insurance Building, Chicago, Illinois. in Wikipedia, < http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Home_Insurance_Building.JPG>, accessed 20 March. 2015.

Plate 2: Royal Liver Building, drawing by Aubrey Thomas Oct 24, 1908. in Heritage Explorer, <http://www.heritageexplorer.co.uk/web/he/searchdetail.aspx?id=10661&crit=design >, accessed 20 March. 2015 Plate 3 & 5: Geist, Johann Friedrich., and Klaus Kürvers. Das Berliner Mietshaus. Vol. 1. München: Prestel, 1980. Print.

Plate 4: Hobrecht-Plan by James Hobrecht 1858. in Wikipedia, < http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HobrechtPlan#/media/File:1856_Bauplanungen.jpg>, accessed 20 March. 2015.

Mietskasernen um 1900. in Entdecken und Verstehe, 1995, < http://www.kripahle-online.de/unterricht/wpcontent/uploads/2011/01/mietskaserne1.jpg>, accessed 10 March. 2015.

Plate 6: U-Bahnhof Friedrichstraße, 1920. in Bayes Book, < http://www.baysebook.com/blog/berlin-192>, accessed 22 March. 2015 Hobrecht-Plan (Detail of Friedrichstadt) by James Hobrecht 1862. in Bayes Book, < http://www.aivberlin.de/uploads/Aktuelles/Mitteilungen/hobrechtplan.pdf>, accessed 22 March. 2015 Plate 7: Friedrichstraße – Unter den Linden, 1920 postcard. in eCrater, < http://www.ecrater.com/p/10024006/1920-berlin-germanypostcard-friedrichstrasse-and-unter>, accessed 20 March. 2015 Bahnhof Berlin-Friedrichstraße, 1920. in Koepenick, http://koepenick.net/galerie-hist-berlin/fotos/bahnhof_friedrich.jpg>, accessed 10 March. 2015 Zimmermann, Florian, and Museum Fu Archiv. Der Schrei Nach Dem Turmhaus: Der Ideenwettbewerb Hochhaus Am Bahnhof Friedrichstrasse, Berlin 1921/22 : Ausstellung Vom 12.10.1988-8.1.1989 Im Bauhaus-Archiv, Museum Für Gestaltung. Berlin: Argon, 1988. 21 Plate 8 & 9: Collages by Author images from Der Schrei Nach Dem Turmhaus: Der Ideenwettbewerb Hochhaus Am Bahnhof Friedrichstrasse, Berlin 1921/22.

Plate 10: Zimmermann, Florian, and Museum Fu Archiv. Der Schrei Nach Dem Turmhaus: Der Ideenwettbewerb Hochhaus Am Bahnhof Friedrichstrasse, Berlin 1921/22 : Ausstellung Vom 12.10.1988-8.1.1989 Im Bauhaus-Archiv, Museum Für Gestaltung. Berlin: Argon, 1988. pages 57-61

Plate 11: Zimmermann, Florian, and Museum Fu Archiv. Der Schrei Nach Dem Turmhaus: Der Ideenwettbewerb Hochhaus Am Bahnhof Friedrichstrasse, Berlin 1921/22 : Ausstellung Vom 12.10.1988-8.1.1989 Im Bauhaus-Archiv, Museum Für Gestaltung. Berlin: Argon, 1988. pages 69-71 Plate 12: Zimmermann, Florian, and Museum Fu Archiv. Der Schrei Nach Dem Turmhaus: Der Ideenwettbewerb Hochhaus Am Bahnhof Friedrichstrasse, Berlin 1921/22 : Ausstellung Vom 12.10.1988-8.1.1989 Im Bauhaus-Archiv, Museum Für Gestaltung. Berlin: Argon, 1988. pages 125-127 Plate 13: Zimmermann, Florian, and Museum Fu Archiv. Der Schrei Nach Dem Turmhaus: Der Ideenwettbewerb Hochhaus Am Bahnhof Friedrichstrasse, Berlin 1921/22 : Ausstellung Vom 12.10.1988-8.1.1989 Im Bauhaus-Archiv, Museum Für Gestaltung. Berlin: Argon, 1988. pages 81-85 Plate 14: Zimmermann, Florian, and Museum Fu Archiv. Der Schrei Nach Dem Turmhaus: Der Ideenwettbewerb Hochhaus Am Bahnhof Friedrichstrasse, Berlin 1921/22 : Ausstellung Vom 12.10.1988-8.1.1989 Im Bauhaus-Archiv, Museum Für Gestaltung. Berlin: Argon, 1988. pages 115-119 Plate 15 (mies): Zimmermann, Florian, and Museum Fu Archiv. Der Schrei Nach Dem Turmhaus: Der Ideenwettbewerb Hochhaus Am Bahnhof Friedrichstrasse, Berlin 1921/22 : Ausstellung Vom 12.10.1988-8.1.1989 Im Bauhaus-Archiv, Museum Für Gestaltung. Berlin: Argon, 1988. pages 107-11 Plate 15 (screenshots): Screenshots from Berlin: Die Sinfonie der Großstadt, in Youtube < https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0NQgIvG-kBM> accessed 15 April 2015 Plate 16: Screenshots from Metropolis, by Fritz Lang in Youtube < https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E1kxfiY_1DA> accessed 15 April 2015 Cities of the Future, Eugène Hénard 1910. in Bayes Book, < http://tumblr.radarq.net/post/1204311029/eugene-henard-cities-ofthe-future-royal>, accessed 22 March. 2015 Plate 17: Cenotaph for Newton, Section, by Etienne-Louis Boullée in Archdaily, <http://www.archdaily.com/544946/ad-classics-cenotaphfor-newton-etienne-louis-boullee/>, accessed 21 April, 2015 The Tennis Court Oath, by Jacque-Louis David in Wikipedia, <http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/6d/Le_Serment_du_Jeu_de_paume.jpg>, accessed 21 April, 2015 Plate 18: First drawing of the Eiffel Tower by Maurice Koechlin, in Wikipedia, <http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/53/Maurice_koechlin_pylone.jpg>, accessed 21 April, 2015 Plate 19:

Projet de globe Reclus, écorché dessiné par Louis Bonnier, in Cairn, < http://www.cairn.info/zen.php?ID_ARTICLE=EG_322_0156>, accessed 21 April, 2015 Plate 20: Globe Tower by Samuel Friede, in Westland, < http://www.westland.net/coneyisland/articles/globetower.htm>, accessed 21 April, 2015 Plate 21: Ichnographia Campo Marzio (detail) by Giovanni Battista Piranesi, in Wordpress, <https://colinwbaillie.wordpress.com/2013/08/21/instauratio-urbis-urban-artefacts-latent-form/> accessed 17 April, 2015 Plate 22: The City of The Future by Eugène Hénard, in Cornell Urban Planning Library, http://urbanplanning.library.cornell.edu/DOCS/henard4.gif accessed 17 April, 2015 Plate 23: Zimmermann, Florian, and Museum Fu Archiv. Der Schrei Nach Dem Turmhaus: Der Ideenwettbewerb Hochhaus Am Bahnhof Friedrichstrasse, Berlin 1921/22 : Ausstellung Vom 12.10.1988-8.1.1989 Im Bauhaus-Archiv, Museum Für Gestaltung. Berlin: Argon, 1988. pages 256 Plate 24: Zimmermann, Florian, and Museum Fu Archiv. Der Schrei Nach Dem Turmhaus: Der Ideenwettbewerb Hochhaus Am Bahnhof Friedrichstrasse, Berlin 1921/22 : Ausstellung Vom 12.10.1988-8.1.1989 Im Bauhaus-Archiv, Museum Für Gestaltung. Berlin: Argon, 1988. pages 259 Plate 25: Zimmermann, Florian, and Museum Fu Archiv. Der Schrei Nach Dem Turmhaus: Der Ideenwettbewerb Hochhaus Am Bahnhof Friedrichstrasse, Berlin 1921/22 : Ausstellung Vom 12.10.1988-8.1.1989 Im Bauhaus-Archiv, Museum Für Gestaltung. Berlin: Argon, 1988. pages 277 Plate 26: Spreedreieck I Berlin, by Mark Braun Architects. In Slab Magazine <http://www.slab-mag.com/2007/05/09/the-hole%E2%80%99sgonna-be-alright/> accessed 18 Feb. 2015.

Friedrichstrasse Skyscraper Project, by Mies van der Rohe. In New York Museum of Modern Art. <http://www.moma.org/collection/object.php?object_id=787> accessed 18 Feb. 2015 Friedrichstrasse Skyscraper Project, by Mies van der Rohe. In New York Museum of Modern Art. <http://www.moma.org/collection/object.php?object_id=787> accessed 18 Feb. 2015 Am Bahnhof Friedrichstraße, by Bernd Havenstein 2009. in Foto Community. < http://www.fotocommunity.de/pc/pc/display/18667728> accessed 31 Jan. 2015