The Lives of Berlin's Tempelhof Airport

Home , Berlin Tempelhof Airport, Tempelhof

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 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. airport as of 2014. Illustrations by author.

60 61

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/thld_a_00674 by guest on 24 September 2021 On the city side, a framed plaza measuring crisscrossed by elevators and ramps, catering eighty by ninety meters was oriented toward to luggage, freight, and mechanical systems; Karl Friedrich Schinkel’s Prussian National a rooftop ballroom is supported by a structural Monument for the Liberation Wars and tied floor of four-meter-high reinforced concrete into Speer’s North-South Axis, its stark, trusses and is crowned by a Beaux-Arts-style limestone-clad façades endorsing Speer’s vision vault. The entrance hall barely clings on of permanence and monumentality (fig. 6). to the tentacles of the administration wings On the airfield side, a forty-meter steel cantilever stretching out toward the city. What results hovered above the apron across the terminal’s is a composite of architectural worlds in their entire length, enabling all-weather dry access own right, functionally interdependent, yet to the planes from the gates and providing spatially separate. Each part maintains a degree the roof structure for the adjacent airplane of structural and formal independence while hangars (fig. 7). remaining committed to the totality. Sagebiel had found a formula that worked This precarious part-to-whole relationship for him as well as his airport: the same act over time has proven to be a remarkably of willful psychological compartmentalization successful strategy for adaptability. With each that had previously allowed him to consolidate incarnation, Tempelhof’s singular parts his move from working as an employee of could be altered, exchanged, rededicated, and Erich Mendelssohn to becoming the principal added to, without compromising the whole. architect of the Ministry of Aviation When the United States Air Force established (Reichsluftfahrtministerium) under Hermann an air base in the northern part of the terminal Göring could be applied as a planning after the war, the building was effectively strategy.7 The result was a project that condensed split along its axis, adding another layer to its the Third Reich’s ambivalence toward composite figure. Supported by a complex modernity and retrogression in a single diagram. system of services and infrastructures and The precarious balance between the accessible through a series of checkpoints, assertion of monumental permanence and the the restricted area was largely autonomous in embrace of an increasingly technologically its operations. An “island within an island,” driven world permeates his design. The prototype the base included a childcare center, dining of the modern airport, Tempelhof was to hall, barber shop, laundromat, movie organize flows of people and material from theater, library, bookstore, tailor, bank, auto check-in to gate.8 It is, at the same time, shop, and an officers’ hotel. The planned inscribed into its formal antithesis: a gigantic, ballroom on top of the departure hall came This image has been removed due to copyright finite, retrogressive, baroque ellipse. The to house a bowling alley and a basketball compartmentalization in the plan is reflected in court, home to the Berlin Brigade’s own restrictions. Please refer to the print version. the terminal’s sectional organization (fig. 8). sports team, the “Berlin Braves” (fig. 9). An aggregate of individually functioning parts In 1971, the rooftop restaurant was is assembled around the central departure “finished,” having taken on a very different hall much like a kit of parts. form: a dimly lit, windowless, soundproof The cantilevered canopy barely touches box accommodated the blinking surveillance the departure hall volume, with a restaurant equipment of the Allied Berlin Air Route precariously perched on its top. A three-level Traffic Control Center and the US military underworld snakes and slips underneath, command center (fig. 10). From where

7. Interestingly, in psychology, the term in impermeable psychic compartments.” 8. This allegedly prompted Sir Norman describes both an ability and a defense Raymond J. Corsini, The Dictionary Foster to call Tempelhof the “mother of mechanism. “Compartmentalization: of Psychology (Milton Park, Abingdon, all airports.”While the origin of this quote 1. Ability to operate in competing and New York: Brunner-Routledge, remains obscure, a detailed interview fig. 4 Below, An early design by Ernst Sagebiel fig. 5 Above, Double bracket diagram of the Tempelhof circumstances, being secure and certain 2002). For detailed information on in which he refers back to this remark can in two or more situations. . . 2. A defense the life and work of Ernst Sagebiel, be found in: Laurenz Demps and Carl- showing the Tempelhof terminal as terminal showing city and airfield. mechanism in which particular see Elke Dittrich, Ernst Sagebiel: Leben Ludwig Paeschke, Flughafen Tempelhof: a floating pier. Photograph by Arthur Köster. Courtesy of Technische Universität Berlin. types of incompatible thoughts and und Werk (1892–1970) (Berlin: Lukas Die Geschichte einer Legende (Berlin: Courtesy of Bundesarchiv Berlin. feelings are isolated from each other Verlag, 2005). Ullstein, 1998), 61–5.

62 63

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/thld_a_00674 by guest on 24 September 2021 On the city side, a framed plaza measuring crisscrossed by elevators and ramps, catering eighty by ninety meters was oriented toward to luggage, freight, and mechanical systems; Karl Friedrich Schinkel’s Prussian National a rooftop ballroom is supported by a structural Monument for the Liberation Wars and tied floor of four-meter-high reinforced concrete into Speer’s North-South Axis, its stark, trusses and is crowned by a Beaux-Arts-style limestone-clad façades endorsing Speer’s vision vault. The entrance hall barely clings on of permanence and monumentality (fig. 6). to the tentacles of the administration wings On the airfield side, a forty-meter steel cantilever stretching out toward the city. What results hovered above the apron across the terminal’s is a composite of architectural worlds in their entire length, enabling all-weather dry access own right, functionally interdependent, yet to the planes from the gates and providing spatially separate. Each part maintains a degree the roof structure for the adjacent airplane of structural and formal independence while hangars (fig. 7). remaining committed to the totality. Sagebiel had found a formula that worked This precarious part-to-whole relationship for him as well as his airport: the same act over time has proven to be a remarkably of willful psychological compartmentalization successful strategy for adaptability. With each that had previously allowed him to consolidate incarnation, Tempelhof’s singular parts his move from working as an employee of could be altered, exchanged, rededicated, and Erich Mendelssohn to becoming the principal added to, without compromising the whole. architect of the Ministry of Aviation When the United States Air Force established (Reichsluftfahrtministerium) under Hermann an air base in the northern part of the terminal Göring could be applied as a planning after the war, the building was effectively strategy.7 The result was a project that condensed split along its axis, adding another layer to its the Third Reich’s ambivalence toward composite figure. Supported by a complex modernity and retrogression in a single diagram. system of services and infrastructures and The precarious balance between the accessible through a series of checkpoints, assertion of monumental permanence and the the restricted area was largely autonomous in embrace of an increasingly technologically its operations. An “island within an island,” driven world permeates his design. The prototype the base included a childcare center, dining of the modern airport, Tempelhof was to hall, barber shop, laundromat, movie organize flows of people and material from theater, library, bookstore, tailor, bank, auto check-in to gate.8 It is, at the same time, shop, and an officers’ hotel. The planned inscribed into its formal antithesis: a gigantic, ballroom on top of the departure hall came finite, retrogressive, baroque ellipse. The to house a bowling alley and a basketball compartmentalization in the plan is reflected in court, home to the Berlin Brigade’s own the terminal’s sectional organization (fig. 8). sports team, the “Berlin Braves” (fig. 9). An aggregate of individually functioning parts In 1971, the rooftop restaurant was is assembled around the central departure “finished,” having taken on a very different hall much like a kit of parts. form: a dimly lit, windowless, soundproof The cantilevered canopy barely touches box accommodated the blinking surveillance the departure hall volume, with a restaurant equipment of the Allied Berlin Air Route precariously perched on its top. A three-level Traffic Control Center and the US military underworld snakes and slips underneath, command center (fig. 10). From where

7. Interestingly, in psychology, the term in impermeable psychic compartments.” 8. This allegedly prompted Sir Norman describes both an ability and a defense Raymond J. Corsini, The Dictionary Foster to call Tempelhof the “mother of mechanism. “Compartmentalization: of Psychology (Milton Park, Abingdon, all airports.” While the origin of this quote 1. Ability to operate in competing and New York: Brunner-Routledge, remains obscure, a detailed interview fig. 4 Below, An early design by Ernst Sagebiel fig. 5 Above, Double bracket diagram of the Tempelhof circumstances, being secure and certain 2002). For detailed information on in which he refers back to this remark can in two or more situations . . . 2. A defense the life and work of Ernst Sagebiel, be found in: Laurenz Demps and Carl- showing the Tempelhof terminal as terminal showing city and airfield. mechanism in which particular see Elke Dittrich, Ernst Sagebiel: Leben Ludwig Paeschke, Flughafen Tempelhof: a floating pier. Photograph by Arthur Köster. Courtesy of Technische Universität Berlin. types of incompatible thoughts and und Werk (1892–1970) (Berlin: Lukas Die Geschichte einer Legende (Berlin: Courtesy of Bundesarchiv Berlin. feelings are isolated from each other Verlag, 2005). Ullstein, 1998), 61–5.

62 63

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/thld_a_00674 by guest on 24 September 2021 spectators were once meant to marvel at If finished as planned, Tempelhof would Luftwaffe airshows, allied reconnaissance have been a “spectacle machine” as much as a came to direct missions into East Germany.9 functional airport: from the embrace of the Thus, forced out of its originally allocated wings of the reception courtyard upon space, the restaurant itself was simply dropped arrival, to the moment of boarding the plane, down a level. passengers would pass through a carefully The unpredictable processes playing orchestrated sequence of spaces and views. From out against the backdrop of the structure the reception hall, travelers would descend a found a temporary apotheosis in 2015, monumental staircase that opened onto the full when, during the Syrian Civil War, the state expanse of the enormous departure hall, which of Berlin decided to house refugees in measured 50 by 100 meters, with a ceiling height the hangars. Up to three thousand people of eighteen meters. On the far end, five ceiling- were accommodated in Tempelhof at height panorama windows would frame the view the peak of occupancy in 2016, and plans out toward the waiting planes. Once separated were made to increase the capacity to from their luggage, passengers would be up to seven thousand.10 distributed into one of twenty departure lounges. By coupling Speer’s formal demands From here, the whole spectacle of the machine with the complexities of a modern age would unfold on the apron through banded infrastructural type, Sagebiel’s model of the windows, before travelers would step down compartmentalized whole had inadvertently onto the tarmac to board the plane. The spectacle created a blueprint for a building that bridged was meant to work in both directions. outer coherence with internal flexibility. The cantilevered roof structure on the airfield While its uses could be reconfigured almost side was engineered as a spectator stand infinitely, the persistence of the diagram of across its entire length, intended to accommodate the double bracket hugging an elliptical enclave up to one hundred thousand observers and elevated Tempelhof to the status of a legible accessible through a series of stairwells from the urban event—a palpable threshold between city side.11 Around the airfield, another one the city and the territory of the airfield. This million spectators were to be accommodated on event would generate ever-changing readings a raised bank, which would have transformed that reflected the changing nature of both the entire airport into a gigantic viewing the enclave and the city. apparatus for the consumption of the spectacle of aviation and, more importantly, the display EVENT I of Nazi military might. Each year, Tempelhof was to host “Tag der Luftwaffe” (Air Force Sagebiel was well aware of Tempelhof’s Day), in what would have been a spectacular event character. His terminal building was event in the Nazi propaganda machine. designed to amplify the experience of The spectacle never quite unfolded transitioning from city to air, from Speer’s as planned by Sagebiel. After the war, half Germania to the machinic domain of of Tempelhof’s diagram fell away. With aviation, from the “representative” to the the departure hall unfinished, no passenger “operative” side. had yet set foot in the terminal building,

9. “The Russians know that the air 10. For details on the proposed expansion Tempelhof in Entwurfszeichnungen corridors are excellent sources of airborne of the refugee camp, see Thomas Loy und Modellen 1935–1944, 15), while the Berlin intelligence for us—and as paranoid as and Sigrid Kneist, “Michael Müller: Landesdenkmalamt (Berlin monument they are, on this they are right on. Our Air Notfalls 7000 Flüchtlinge nach authority) references sixty-five thousand Force, the British and French bring in Tempelhof,” Tagesspiegel, January 8, 2016, (“Flughafen Tempelhof und Platz der planes that carry specialized photographic https://www.tagesspiegel.de/berlin/ Luftbrücke,” Landesdenkmalamt, and electronic surveillance equipment. fluechtlinge-in-berlin-michael-mueller- http://www.stadtentwicklung.berlin.de/ With side angle cameras, we can see almost notfalls-7000-fluechtlinge-nach- denkmal/liste_karte_datenbank/de/ 50% of the G.D.R.” Harold Schwartz, tempelhof/12806236.html. denkmaldatenbank/daobj.php?obj_dok_ fig. 6 Above, City-side view of Tempelhof fig. 7 Below, Airfield-side view of Tempelhof Outpost Berlin: Cold War 1961–1964 11. Different numbers can be found in this nr=09055090). (Bloomington, IN: Trafford Publishing, regard. Dittrich gives a number of one entry plaza, 2013. Photograph by author. boarding gates and apron under 40-meter steel 2010), 164. hundred thousand (Dittrich, Der Flughafen cantilever, 2013. Photograph by author.

64 65

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/thld_a_00674 by guest on 24 September 2021 while the urban side pointed toward a city DIALECTIC CITY / in rubble. When the Soviets blocked DIALECTIC ISLAND access to West Berlin, now an island in Soviet occupied East Germany, the “infrastructural” Berlin has never followed one idea alone, side saw an unlikely resurgence: as part but has been formed on divergent ideas. of the Berlin airlift organized by the Western Theses and antitheses coincide here Allies, the airport became a hub for like breathing in and breathing out.12 the goods flown in from the air bases in Oswald Mathias Ungers the western part of Germany. Between June 1948 and May 1949, more than 2.3 million In its palimpsestic nature, Tempelhof is tons of freight were supplied to Berlin a reflection of Berlin itself. The city is a via planes landing at peak intervals of ninety battleground of utopian projects that have left seconds. As much as an infrastructural marks on its fabric and persist as a collection challenge, the Berlin airlift was a media event. of urban fragments. Ungers proposed a Footage of US C-54 and C-47 planes scheme that assembled these fragments into queuing on the tarmac made news headlines a conceptual whole, in what today may be his and helped transform the perception best-known project. Published in different of the Western Allied forces from occupier versions and with a variety of titles, the green to benefactor. The airfield side’s soaring archipelago project was the outcome of the 1977 cantilever was a welcome backdrop: its steel Cornell Summer Academy, with significant and glass structure matching the image of contributions by Ungers’s former student Rem Allied infrastructural efficiency at the service Koolhaas and others.13 Prompted by Berlin’s of a humanitarian cause. In an ironic twist, economic crisis and shrinking population, the even Hitler’s spectator stands around the airfield project proposed a consolidation of the city were reappropriated. Flying in through into a series of inhabited “islands,” while razing three available air corridors, Allied planes were large parts of the urban fabric in between. greeted by cheering crowds of Berliners who Areas to be preserved were selected based on gathered on the banks of the airfield, providing their capacity to formulate a coherent an “airshow” of a different kind (fig. 11). “thesis” about a type of ideal city in an unbroken The outlines of Sagebiel’s spectacle model unison of morphology and ideology. Conceived remained surprisingly intact: the airfield’s as a series of “pure” theses on urbanism, ellipse acted as a cinematic apparatus the green archipelago project proposed that that focused the gaze of a mass collective urban islands would float in a metropolitan inward toward a spectacle that held void of shared infrastructures and recreational the implication of a possible (urban) future. spaces. Ungers graphically aligned his islands In the case of the Luftwaffe, this future with famous examples of visionary cities, laying found its logical conclusion in a city in ruins. claim to the reading of each island as a In the case of the “candy bombers,” as fragment of an ideal city. In all their difference, the allied transport aircraft were colloquially these fragments were united in a codependent known, it was the promise of infrastructural federative system: Ivan Leonidov’s linear city of capabilities to reconstruct the city Magnitogorsk was suspended next to Friedrich and democratic society that was offered. Weinbrenner’s plan for Karlsruhe in an urban In the airlift scenario, the city itself is space of exacerbated difference. Ungers all but absent, fashioned as a non-city reduced referred to this quality as coincidentia oppositorum to rubble awaiting its renaissance, for (coincidence of opposites), a term borrowed which the performative efficiency of the airport from Nicholas of Cusa’s De docta ignorantia.14 is to act as a catalyst. In Ungers’s archipelago, morphology equals

fig. 8 Above, Section drawing showing terminal’s fig. 9 Below, Basketball court in former 12. Ungers, “Cities within the City: Proposals critical edition of Ungers’s text by Florian 14. Nicholas of Cusa, De docta ignorantia. by the Sommer Akademie for Berlin,” 94. Hertweck and Sébastien Marot, eds., The composite organization as a “kit of parts.” ballroom above departure hall, 2013. 13. The genesis of the green archipelago City in the City – Berlin: A Green Archipelago Courtesy of Technische Universität Berlin. Photograph by author. has been traced in great detail in a recent (Zurich: Lars Müller Publishers, 2013).

66 67

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/thld_a_00674 by guest on 24 September 2021 ideology. Karlsruhe and Magnitogorsk are at the architectural scale and made architecture formally distinct, and their coexistence relies a problem of formal legibility at the urban on absolute spatial segregation.15 scale. Ungers illustrates the first with a depiction Tempelhof both endorses and frustrates of the medieval city of Arles occupying the Ungers’s archipelago of dialectic parts: its fortified container of the former amphitheater distinct neobaroque geometry makes it legible after the decline of the Roman Empire. as a fragment of Speer’s ideal city of Germania, He writes: “Grossform creates the framework, and therefore part of Berlin’s assemblage of the order and the planned space for an ideologies. But the inherent contradictions at unpredictable, unplanned for, spontaneous the very core of its inception make it much process—for a parasitic architecture. less of a pure unit of morphology and ideology Without this component any planning than Unger’s islands. What Ungers describes remains rigid and lifeless.”18 as “autonomous entities . . . small microcosms, Programmatically, Tempelhof’s multiple independent worlds with their own special uses can be understood in analogy to Grossform: features, advantages and disadvantages, the formal framework establishes an architectural integrated in a larger, urban macrocosm” have presence sui generis that over time supersedes played out in Tempelhof both over time immediate considerations of function and bridges and cotemporally.16 Theses and antitheses in ideological differences—between the Tempelhof are suspended not at the scale monumental architecture of imperial Rome and of the city but condensed into a single structure. medieval residential fabric in Arles, or between Speer’s monumentality meets the mechanics Nazi prestige project and refugee camp in of aviation. Secretive Cold War efficiency hovers Tempelhof. But more importantly, Tempelhof above tourists en route to Italian beaches. begins to speak to Grossform’s agency in Tempelhof is Karlsruhe and Magnitogorsk the city. Conceived as alternative to the in one: a “dialectic island” in its own right. systems-oriented urbanism predominant in The compacting of coinciding opposites to sixties discourse, it acts as a decidedly formal the scale of architecture in Tempelhof echoes countermeasure to the disintegration of one of Ungers’s earlier takes on the subject in traditional city form facilitated by this discourse. Grossform, a precursor to both the archipelago “The existence of a figure and theme” sets and the dialectic city. Published in 1966 during Grossform apart from the managerial aspects his tenure at the Technical University of Berlin, of urban development and provides a sense of “Grossformen im Wohnungsbau” reimagined place and identity.19 Ungers’s demand that “we the singular architectural intervention at a scale must be in the position of describing the visible between architecture and urbanism as a counter- connection of the single parts of a settlement measure to the rapid urbanization brought or urban area as an event” presupposes the about by Europe’s postwar boom.17 The formal conscious recognition and conceptual synthesis coherence of Grossform was to provide a of Grossform’s distinctness on the part framework within which unplannable processes of the urban subject.20 could play out, while it acted as a stable marker Ungers achieves this by summoning formal of identity in an expanding field of formless “themes” against the contingencies of urbanization. Grossform simultaneously revised infrastructure in projects such as Cologne’s the doctrine of modernist functionalism Grünzug Süd (1962–65) or Berlin’s Tiergartenviertel

15. Ungers would later elaborate on this pluralistic nature of the city. Ungers 18. Ibid. (Translation of quote author’s own.) concept: the “dialectic city” amends and Vieths, The Dialectic City, 21. 19. Oswald Mathias Ungers, “Notes on the atemporal still image of the 16. Ibid., 20. Megaform,” in Grossformen im archipelago with the dimension of 17. The work was initially the fifth installment Wohnungsbau, ed. Oswald Mathias Ungers time, replacing the spatial segregation of the Veröffentlichungen zur Architektur and Erika Muhlthaler (Berlin: TU Berlin, of the archipelago with a system series in December 1966. Oswald Mathias Institut für Architektur, 2007), n.p. of “superimposed layers” that “can be Ungers, Grossformen im Wohnungsbau 20. Ibid. supplemented, reduced, perfected (Berlin: TU Berlin, Lehrstuhl für Entwerfen fig. 10 Above, Berlin Air Route Traffic fig. 11 Below, Berliners watching a C-54 land or changed.” From the sum of these und Gebäudelehre, Veröffentlichungen zur Control Center, 1987. at Berlin Tempelhof Airport, 1948. codependent layers emerges the Architektur, no. 5, December 1966). Photograph courtesy of Thomas Farr. Photograph by United States Air Force.

68 69

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/thld_a_00674 by guest on 24 September 2021 fig. 12 Stills from Palimpsest I: Berlin showing fig. 13 Stills from Palimpsest I: Berlin showing Tempelhof runway, Wenhua Shi, 2014. Tempelhof runway, Wenhua Shi, 2014. Printed with permission of the artist. Printed with permission of the artist.

70 71

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/thld_a_00674 by guest on 24 September 2021 (1972). While these projects are atemporal War II bombs—which today have been all snapshots, with both “theme” and “city” as fixed but filled by luxury apartments. entities, Tempelhof infuses this dialectic with Opened to the public as a temporary park in temporality: beyond its form, Tempelhof’s May 2010, Tempelhof is greeted as the last of “theme” of the double bracket/elliptical enclave Berlin’s great voids. The airfield offers a spatial begins to constitute a device through which the experience unlike any other—its vastness changing city can be apprehended. The “reading” creates a sense of distance from the pressures of of Tempelhof and the status of the city are “the relentless regimentation of everydayness not absolutes, but become contingent on each and the discipline of for-profit development.”22 other. In all incarnations, Tempelhof has The horizontal surface has become a playing taken on the role of the dialectic opposite of the field for unscripted activities: joggers, kite flyers, contemporaneous city. As an enclave of the cyclists, roller skaters, people out for a stroll. machine age in Speer’s plan for Germania, as a The new event turns both Speers and the Allies’ model for humanitarian efficiency in a city in model upside down: the concerted roles of rubble during the airlift, or as unscripted spectator and performer explode into thousands territory in a rapidly gentrifying city of today, of micro-spectacles (figs. 12, 13). The changing the “event” of Tempelhof has reliably provided roles of observer and observed are dependent on Berlin with its mirror image. temporary constellations of the urban playing field. In its latest incarnation, Tempelhof changes EVENT II the interplay between the urban artifact and the city once again: Sagebiel conceived of the air Grossform’s role in the constant reevaluation of stadium as an apparatus meant to channel the the city is exemplified in Tempelhof’s most collective energy of a city toward a militarized recent incarnation. After its closure in 2008, the endeavor. During the airlift, it became a physical airport was inaccessible for two years while it and metaphorical catalyst through which the awaited its eventual fate. Berlin had long moved city was infused with (literal) energy, food, and on from Speer’s megalomania and recovered goods brought in for the construction of a new from war destruction. Tempelhof reentered the collective consciousness in defense of the “free public consciousness of a city torn between world.” Today, as much as a stage, Tempelhof acts official directives to become a contemporary as a spectator stand. From the airfield’s European capital, increasing real estate pressure, privileged position of emptiness, the surrounding and bottom-up efforts to preserve the legacy city itself becomes the spectacle (fig. 14). As of what Markus Miessen famously calls “spaces of Dominik Bartmański writes, “Kept unchanged uncertainty.”21 Postwar West Berlin had been a and undeveloped, Tempelhof can offer an urban city of voids, absent both of built form but horizon of city icons—church and mosque equally of constraining codes of conduct and towers, the TV Tower, etc.—and thus rearticulate predetermined experience. In recent years, these the city’s character as a visual synthesis.”23 voids have started to disappear—some closed in concerted development efforts, such as AFTERLIFE the cold war no-man’s land of Potsdamer Platz, while others were erased quietly, such as the In May 2014, a popular referendum rejected once omnipresent Baulücken—gaps torn in the the city’s master plan for a partial development nineteenth-century block structure by World of the airfield.24 The resulting Tempelhof

21. Kenny Cupers and Markus Miessen, 23. Ibid., 234. official masterplan against a draft bill by Spaces of Uncertainty (Wuppertal, 24. Since 2012, the initiative 100% Tempelhofer the citizen’s group, allowing “yes” and Germany: Müller + Busmann, 2002). Feld had lobbied for a popular vote “no” votes for both (City Master Plan: yes: 22. Dominik Bartmański, “A Temple of Social to reject any future development of 40.5%/no: 59.4%, Citizen’s Group draft Hope? Tempelhof Airport in Berlin and the area in favor of maintaining its status bill: yes: 64.4%/no: 35.5%. http://www. Its Transformation,” in National Matters: as a public space, urban ecosystem, and spiegel.de/politik/deutschland/ Materiality, Culture, and Nationalism, ed. historic site. After collecting 222,000 initial tempelhof-volksentscheid-berliner- Geneviève Zubrzycki (Stanford, CA: signatures, the initiative forced a popular stimmen-gegen-bebauung-a-971608.html). fig. 14 Tempelhof Park, 2014. Stanford University Press, 2017), 231. referendum, which pitched the city’s Photograph by author.

72 73

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/thld_a_00674 by guest on 24 September 2021 statute (Gesetz zum Erhalt des Tempelhofer implies a scenario in which this common ground MAROŠ KRIVÝ as smart subjects is coextensive with the Feldes) forced the city to refrain from is absent.25 Today, as civic contracts that enable processes of urban financialization, real estate implementing plans that would have privatized the equal unfolding of pluralistic enclaves speculation, and gentrification.2 The smartness the area and restricted the erection of are progressively falling prey to privatization, The Smart and mandate’s effect on the Fordist-Keynesian permanent structures, thereby keeping the unhindered growth, or economic depression, industrial fabric is nevertheless aesthetically airfield in its entirety open to the public. this scenario increasingly becomes reality. What the Ruined: compelling. As epitomized by the rise of the In 2016, the statute was amended to allow for the planners are left with is the island itself. If Notes on the New Hudson Yards “quantified community” next to relocation of refugees housed in the hangars Grossform provides the theoretical blueprint and following the completion of the High into temporary container villages on the apron, for a new project of the “pluralistic object,” Social Factory Line in New York City or the consolidation of prompting fears that the necessary site Tempelhof is its forgotten in situ experiment. Amazon’s (first) headquarters, located in developments implemented to this end could It affirms Ungers’s thesis of the continuous Seattle’s South Lake Union, the environments be the first step toward furtive development. programmatic reinvention of Grossform itself, It has become habitual to associate the of speculative digital futures are full of Tempelhof’s future remains open, as the airport but more importantly equally demonstrates smart city with greenfield megaprojects in reminiscence of the industrial past (fig. 1).3 continues to spar with the forces of the city’s how, over time, it can facilitate the continuous deserts and on reclaimed land, where the culture, economy, and everyday life. reinvention of the city. ideal of ubiquitous sensing infrastructures RESTORATION-AS-RUINATION In Tempelhof, the opposites of permanence The scenario of retreat to the architectural coexists with the realities of banal and and reinvention are entangled at both the scale scale as last bastion of pluralism may seem expendable architecture. Smart cities, according Introducing the concept of restoration-as- of the artifact and between the artifact and the daunting. But it may also hold opportunities to to media historian Orit Halpern, operate ruination, this essay examines the practice of city. Pertaining to this issue’s debate on “repeat” overcome the persisting dichotomy between as perpetual prototypes that follow a logic of restoring industrial built fabric by exposing worlds, concepts, and buildings, Tempelhof offers “object” and “city” haunting today’s discursive software development. They are facets of and accentuating signs of its dereliction. It then a scenario in which repetition—as a reiteration landscape. Recent discourse echoes, to an a pervasive “smartness mandate” that calls for explores the ways in which the atmospheres of something existing—is exchanged for a mode extent, the paradigm shift of the sixties, from optimizing humans’ ability to adapt to of simulated industrial past foster, by way of of “permanent reinvention.” Tempelhof’s which Grossform emerged against the the urban environment by means of extensive inversion, the post-Fordist political economy permanence resides in the persistence of its form systems thinking of Ungers’s contemporaries: computational infrastructures, as much as it and its smartness mandate. Can we think of that as much as its modus operandi—the way in which maybe as a reaction to the boundless delivers a “political imperative that smartness disrepair by design as an aesthetic proof its event character channels the continuous expansion of architecture into networks and be extended to all areas of life.”1 of the passing of the industrial society? How reinvention of the city. Essential to this mode of (digital) flows since the nineties, issues such Considering the significant impact of does the current vogue for so-called ruderal reinvention is not the exclusive agency of an as architecture’s disciplinarity or “objectness” smart policies on the extant fabric of cities landscapes present as inevitable the societal author, but the architectural artifact itself. are seeing a resurgence.26 With regards around the world, the smart city is not model built around data infrastructures?4 The repositioning of the architectural object to questions of urbanism, this has led to an only a developmental but increasingly a Restoration-as-ruination is a familiar strategy as central to, but not identical with, the processes unfortunate impasse: urban agency is re-developmental strategy. The mandate of urban cultural revitalization. One finds that constitute the city has been at the core widely sought in informality, grassroots efforts, to retrofit industrial cities with digital a succinct definition in Robert Smithson’s 1967 of much of Ungers’s work on the city. The explicit or infrastructure, while the architectural infrastructures and recondition their citizens assertion that “installations should empty focus on the singular architectural intervention object tends to be considered within the narrow in Grossform, against which these processes constraints of representation, form, or affect. The author is grateful for the support, Wolfgang Pietsch, “Test-Bed Urbanism,” 3. The term “quantified community” has are read, makes it a pertinent model beyond its Grossform is a reminder that “object” and “city” comments, and suggestions of Matthew Public Culture 25, no. 2 (2013): 272–306; been pioneered by the Hudson Yards Gandy, Tahl Kaminer, Keiti Kljavin, Jennifer Gabrys, “Programming project partner, New York University’s historical status as precursor to the green need not necessarily be mutually exclusive; the editors Walker Downey and Sarah Environments: Environmentality and Center for Urban Science and Progress. archipelago. Containing coinciding opposites Tempelhof is as much an object in the city as Rifky, and two anonymous reviewers. Citizen Sensing in the Smart City,” It derives from the so-called quantified The research forms part of the ERC project Environment and Planning D: Society and self label. See Shannon Mattern, within, Grossform shifts the pluralistic endeavor it is a city inside an object. Rethinking Urban Nature. Space 32, no. 1 (2014): 30–48; Alberto “Instrumental City: The View from from the archipelago to the island itself. Where Vanolo, “Smartmentality: The Smart Hudson Yards, circa 2019,” Places Journal, the archipelago relies on its dialectic islands MAROŠ KRIVÝ is a research fellow at City as Disciplinary Strategy,” Urban April 2016, https://placesjournal.org/ the Department of Geography, University Studies 51, no. 5 (2014): 883–98; Orit Halpern, article/instrumental-city-new-york- as much as the “sea”—the neutral grid as the of Cambridge, and Director of the Graduate Beautiful Data (Durham, NC: Duke hudson-yards. great equalizer and shared common ground of Program in Urban Studies at the Faculty University Press, 2015), 1–8; and Maroš 4. On the West German history of studying, of Architecture, Estonian Academy of Arts. Krivý, “Towards a Critique of Cybernetic appreciating, and protecting urban the urban enterprise as such—Grossform He is a writer, urbanist, and architectural Urbanism: The Smart City and landscapes with ruderal vegetation, see historian whose work explores environments the Society of Control,” Planning Theory Jens Lachmund, Greening Berlin: of architecture ranging from cybernetic 17, no. 1 (2018): 8–30. The Co-Production of Science, Politics, 25. Interestingly, the “sea” in the archipelago the grid itself becomes the true hero architecture’s disciplinary core today. media to wastelands. 2. Neil Smith, “Toward a Theory and Urban Nature (Cambridge, MA: drawings is often represented as a gridded of his narrative of Manhattan. With regard to objectness, one can of Gentrification: A Back to the City MIT Press, 2013); and Matthew Gandy, background upon which the islands float. 26. The upcoming 107th Association of think here of the impact that philosophies 1. Orit Halpern, Robert Mitchell, Movement by Capital, not People,” “Unintentional Landscapes,” Landscape Koolhaas fully realized the importance Collegiate Schools of Architecture annual of object-oriented ontology have had and Bernard Dionysius Geoghegan, “The Journal of the American Planning Association Research 41, no. 4 (2016): 433–40. of this grid as a manifestation of the civic meeting (Black Box: Articulating on architectural discourse in recent years. Smartness Mandate: Notes toward a 45, no. 4 (1979): 538–48; Rachel Weber, contract underlying the condition Architecture’s Core in the Post-Digital Critique,” Grey Room 68 (2017): 106–29, 111. “Extracting Value from the City: of plurality. In his version of archipelago Era), for example, is entirely dedicated On the smart city see also Orit Halpern, Neoliberalism and Urban Redevelopment,” urbanism (Delirious New York, 1978), to the question of what constitutes Jesse LeCavalier, Nerea Calvillo, and Antipode 34, no. 3 (2002): 519–40.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/thld_a_00674 by guest on 24 September 2021