For proponents of a radically new Berlin, Stimmann was anathema. His critics called him “a demon for Prussian order” and condemned his vision of Berlin as “New Teutonia.” The Polish-born American architect, Daniel Libeskind, who would design post-Wall Berlin’s most innovative building, the Jewish Museum, had little patience with the rules laid down by the building commissioner’s office. These regulations ignored, said Libeskind, Berlin’s more recent tradition of breaking-with-tradition, of setting off in new directions. As examples of such daring modernity, Libeskind liked to cite Erich Mendelsohn’s Columbushaus, Bruno Taut’s Horseshoe Housing Estate, and Peter Behrens’s AEG Turbine Factory. “There is an unnerving nostalgia for the past,” he declared. Stimmann’s rules constituted “the total erasure of fifty years of history of this city. It is going back to a time when things were not problematic, coupled with an authoritarian ideal of how to develop the city.” Another Stimmann critic, the Frankfurt art historian Heinrich Klotz, echoed this charge of authoritarianism, to which he added megalomania. “Herr Stimmann and his allies claim that they are setting the world-standard for urban construction. Their blown-up metropolitan pretensions are simply embarrassing.” After locking horns with Stimmann on the Potsdamer Platz plan, Rem Koolhaas, a noted Dutch architect, concluded that Berlin was simply not up to the task of setting urban-design standards for the rest of Germany and the world. “Berlin has become the capital at the very moment it is least able to take on the responsibility,” he declared. The American critic, Goldberger, also doubted that Stimmann’s Berlin was capable of breaking new ground: “What is troubling about the city’s present architectural picture,” he wrote, “is the sense that in post-Wall Berlin the very openness to new ideas and new forms that so long defined the city’s culture is threatened by a desire to make Berlin too comfortable. It is as if the city had gone from oppression to smugness in one step.” In the view of Richard Rogers, Berlin was “architecturally lost.”
As might have been predicted, what resulted from the clash of visions over Potsdamer Platz was a series of compromises that left no one entirely satisfied. The architects were allowed to build somewhat higher than the general plan specified, and they were not forced to conform to a strict stylistic blueprint. On the other hand, they had to tone down some of their boldest conceits, abide by the mixed-use requirement, reduce intended space for parking, and preserve historical structures. In Daimler-Benz’s case, this last stricture meant salvaging the Weinhaus Huth, a tavern-restaurant established in 1871 in which Theodor Fontane had been a regular, Himmler had held court, and Hitler’s half-brother Alois had worked as head waiter in the 1930s. Sony had to preserve part of the facade and the “Kaisersaal” of the Grand Hotel Esplanade, which had been 90 percent destroyed in the war. To salvage this structure Sony went to the extraordinary length of building around the facade and moving the Kaisersaal seventy-five meters to the west. The old world would thus live on in the new, though as quaint museum pieces, rather like Augustus Pugin’s “Medieval Room” in Joseph Paxton’s Crystal Palace of 1851.
Potsdamer Platz in the mid-1990s was invariably described as “Europe’s largest construction site,” but in addition to being large the project was extremely challenging technically. Given Berlin’s location above a giant aquifer, the builders created a sizable body of water as they dug foundations; divers worked sixty feet under the surface of this murky “lake,” casting the concrete slabs on which the buildings would be propped. When the anchors were secured, pumps removed the ground water, but the pumpers had to be careful not to suck out too much lest they starve the trees in the neighboring Tiergarten. As they excavated, crews came across artifacts of Berlin’s recent past: SchultheiB beer mugs, plates from the Café Josty, countless bomb fragments, and a “Stalin-Organ” rocket-launcher. One wonders what the workers, many of whom were Irish and Portuguese, made of these finds.
