The Lives of Berlin's Tempelhof Airport
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MARTIN HÄTTASCH during the Soviet blockade, a Nazi prestige project almost instantaneously transformed SPACE RE-LIVED into a symbol of the “free world.” With Permanent Reinvention: its closure, the structure came to exemplify the urban questions and pressures facing The Lives of Berlin’s Berlin twenty years after the fall of the wall and Tempelhof Airport became a testing ground for different forms of participatory urbanism. Finally, in the wake of the Syrian Civil War and mass displacement, ARTIFACT its hangars served as shelter for Germany’s largest refugee camp, occupying a central The decommissioned Tempelhof airport role in a political debate far beyond the former carves a void into Berlin’s urban fabric between airfield’s spatial confines. the districts of Kreuzberg, Neukölln, Increasingly, research is addressing both the and Tempelhof. Roughly elliptical in shape, the ghosts of Tempelhof’s past and its role in the 355-hectare area far supersedes Berlin’s contemporary debate on public space in Berlin. Tiergarten and is equal in size to New York Yet, writings tend to either offer historical City’s Central Park. The airfield is framed accounts or focus on select instances, framed in the northwest by the 300,000-square-meter almost exclusively in terms of the dialectics terminal building, whose arc is centered of content.1 Prone to (false) dichotomies, the on the ellipse’s vertex and follows its outline assessment of Tempelhof’s past all too over a length of 1.2 kilometers (figs. 1, 2, 3). easily becomes a question of Nazi monument vs. Since its closure in 2008, the area has increasingly symbol of the “free world,” while its future become the focus of public debate in a is widely framed as a choice between grassroots city torn between the ghosts of its past(s) and activism and top-down development.2 ambitions for its future. The structure has The dilemma remains how to assess Tempelhof led multiple, often contradictory, lives over the in its totality of incarnations and conceptualize course of its existence. The airport came what is arguably its greatest quality: the seeming into being already leading a double life: as the paradox of the coexistence of a multitude prototype of the modern airport, it was of opposites—formal, ideological, functional, inscribed into the retrogressive neobaroque and symbolic—inside the same structure plan of Adolf Hitler’s chief architect Albert both over time and concurrently. Much like Speer for the transformation of Berlin into the what Aldo Rossi termed an “urban artifact,” world capital Germania. Neither totalizing Tempelhof—in this essay, referring to the monument to Nazi grandeur nor agent of the built structures of the terminal and machine age, Tempelhof has perfected over the geometrically and physically defined the years the chameleon-like quality of taking interventions of the airfield—has been on oscillating meanings associated with its both an enduring physical presence, while monumental presence. Following World War it has continuously reinvented itself in II, the airport became West Berlin’s lifeline relation to the city.3 MARTIN HÄTTASCH is a German A project that is aimed at increasing González Ruibal and Gabriel Moshenska architect whose design and research the awareness of Tempelhof’s National (New York: Springer, 2014), 137–52. focus on the intersection of architecture Socialist past and the history of forced 2. For a good example of this debate, and urbanism. He holds degrees from labor on the site is the archaeological see Benjamin Deboosere and Wouter TU Braunschweig and Princeton excavation undertaken on the site de Raeve, eds., On Tempelhofer Feld University, and is currently a lecturer in 2012–13 as a collaboration between (Leipzig: Spector Books, 2016). at the University of Texas at Austin the State Conservation Office, the 3. Aldo Rossi introduces the term in his where he teaches design and theory. Freie Universität Berlin, and the Senate canonical book The Architecture of Department for Urban Development the City to describe a specific manmade 1. For a good account, see Elke Dittrich’s (http://www.ausgrabungen-tempelhof.de). intervention that relates to the city work on Sagebiel and Tempelhof: See also S. Pollock and R. Bernbeck, over time rather than through function. Elke Dittrich, Der Flughafen Tempelhof in “A gate to a darker world: Excavating See Aldo Rossi, The Architecture of the Entwurfszeichnungen und Modellen at the Tempelhof Airport,” in Ethics City (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1982). 1935–1944 (Berlin: Lukas Verlag, 2012). and the Archaeology of Violence, ed. Alfredo PART II Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/thld_a_00674 by guest on 24 September 2021 fig. 1 View of Tempelhof airport terminal from fig. 2 View of airfield from waiting lounge, 2013. the airfield, 2013. Photograph by author. Photograph by author. 58 59 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/thld_a_00674 by guest on 24 September 2021 fig. 1 View of Tempelhof airport terminal from fig. 2 View of airfield from waiting lounge, 2013. the airfield, 2013. Photograph by author. Photograph by author. 58 59 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/thld_a_00674 by guest on 24 September 2021 Even more than Rossi, it is German architect DOUBLE LIFE/DIAGRAM Oswald Mathias Ungers who can provide a lens through which to assess Tempelhof’s ongoing Tempelhof came into the world as a diagram of dialectics of reinvention between form, content, coinciding opposites. Its antithetical split and meaning. The idea of coinciding opposites of ideological allegiance took on built form when —borrowing the term “coincidentia oppositorum” architect Ernst Sagebiel was tasked in 1935 from Neoplatonic philosophy—as a coherent with the design of a new airport terminal building, framework for a diversity of contents, was a one suitable for the Reich’s capital city, recurring theme in Ungers’s work, both at to replace the previous structure. His references the urban and architectural scale.4 His concept were initially modern: Hamburg’s Fuhlsbüttel of the dialectic city proposes a multiplicity- airport (1929) and Frank Lloyd Wright’s within-unity model at the city scale—famously Lehigh airport competition entry (1929) inspired epitomized in his green archipelago project, a blueprint for a building type with few which imagines a pluralistic federation of discrete precedents.6 Early designs show an arched pier urban islands, each formulating a different suspended high above the tarmac, under which “thesis” in unison of form and ideological a continuous apron would allow planes to move content.5 Tempelhof complicates this model between the airfield and city sides (fig. 4). In as it exists as a distinct island in the city and, this version, the mechanics and movements of at the same time, comprises “theses” and aviation were an all-encompassing presence, “antitheses” at the scale of the island itself. This almost playfully blurring the distinction between possibility of the pluralistic whole to exist at city and airport. As the design progressed, the scale of architecture is most lucidly described Speer, who had been named general building by Ungers’s relatively unknown concept of inspector (Generalbauinspektor), became Grossform (larger form)—a precursor to both the increasingly involved in the process. Speer archipelago and the dialectic city. Through demanded that the airport, located in its strong formal definition, Grossform is meant proximity to Berlin’s new North-South Axis, to provide outer coherence for the inner be integrated into his overall scheme to agglomeration of changing activities, while transform the city, with the airport serving as maintaining a palpable presence in the the centerpiece the to Nazi capital Germania. urban realm. By approaching Tempelhof through Torn between his dynamic vision and the framework of Grossform, this essay hopes Speer’s prescriptive neoclassicism, Sagebiel’s to provide a possible conceptual narrative for dilemma appeared substantial: subsequent the former airport, while reconstituting iterations of the design were characterized by an Grossform as a relevant project of urbanism. increasingly closed and monumental façade In light of urban environments in which the pointing toward the city, exchanging the airiness city’s ability to act as the common ground of of the floating pier for a distinct duality the pluralistic enterprise being increasingly under between a city and an airfield side. But in threat by a limitless proliferation of building “compromising” the all-encompassing production and the simultaneous disintegration modernist-utopian character of the terminal, of public planning institutions, the case for Sagebiel created a diagram of remarkable a project that situates plurality at the scale of clarity (fig. 5). Two brackets, back to back, architecture may today be stronger than ever. embraced two visions of modernity: 4. Ungers uses the term “coincidentia throughout his career, namely in the green entry for the Lehigh airport competition. oppositorum” in reference to Nicholas of archipelago project for Berlin (1977) Wright’s design also features an arched Cusa, De docta ignorantia (Strasbourg: or his idea of Grossform (1966). See Oswald terminal building that frames the strong Martin Flach [printer], not after 1489). Mathias Ungers, Rem Koolhaas, with geometric center figure—in this case 5. Ungers first uses the term “dialectic city” Peter Riemann, Hans Kollhoff, and Arthur a circle—of the airfield. Fuhlsbüttel, in his book The Dialectic City (Oswald Ovaska, “Cities within the City: Proposals Hamburg’s first airport terminal (1929), Mathias Ungers and Stefan Vieths, by the Sommer Akademie for Berlin,” pioneered a curved terminal building fig. 3 Left, Urban figure of Tempelhof airport The Dialectic City [Milan: Skira, 1997]), but in Lotus International 19 (1978): 82–97. that separated traffic flows on different many of the conceptual underpinnings 6. A similar cantilevered canopy structure was levels and included extensive spectator as planned; right, Urban figure of Tempelhof were developed continuously used by Frank Lloyd Wright in his 1929 terraces on the roof.