Urban Triage: Berlin's International Building Exhibition Sheds Light On The City's Uncertain Urban Future

Despite Berlin’s undisputed status as a European cultural hub, its inner city is being anesthetised - and is in desparate need of a healthcare plan

“What’s wrong with Germany”? So reads the cover of the December-January issue of Mark Magazine. The glossy center section includes in-depth investigations of three of the country’s architectural mega-problems “steeped in scandal”: Berlin’s Brandenburg Airport, Hamburg’s Elbphilharmonie, and Stuttgart’s new central train station, S21. As the articles make clear, you’d be hard-pressed to find a singular answer to “what’s wrong” in each city, much less the country as a whole, but there are certainly some running themes –overambitious time frames, underambitious budgets, lack of governmental transparency, and many years wasted finger-pointing, for instance.

Luckily, over the last century German cities have developed an institutional apparatus to address precisely these problems. Behold the Internationale Bauaustellung (International Building Exhibition, or IBA): a citywide initiative exploring contemporary development issues in architecture and urban planning. Though generally instated by city governments, the IBA has become an umbrella for any number of public and private initiatives, serving the multiple purposes of showing off existing projects, initiating new ones, and inviting feedback from citizens and outsiders. Since the first edition in Darmstadt in 1901, there have been 13 IBAs of varying size and ambition across Germany – eight of which have taken off since just 2000. Over recent decades the boundaries of what defines the format have become rather nebulous – even their German-ness: in 2010 the tri-city region of Basel jumped on board and started one too.

Interbau, was Berlin’s major post-war reconstruction and face-saving plan, which took place from 1957-61 as part of the International Building Exhibition (IBA’57)

The most prominent IBA in history has certainly been Interbau, Berlin’s major post-war reconstruction and face-saving plan, which took place from 1957-61. Interbau brought 53 international architects to redesign the destroyed Hansaviertel area, ushering in an era of postwar modernism along with 1.4 million visitors and their pocketbooks. Three decades later a second Berlin IBA was held (1879-87), turning its focus to “careful reconstruction” and renewal. Despite downplaying flashy new buildings, the second edition had some political similarities with the last – aiming to reestablish West Berlin as a progressive entity on the world stage in contrast to its eastern counterpart, and to perpetuate its image as the epicenter of German culture by updating its architectural profile....Continue Reading

> via The Architectural Review