Plans for abandoned airstrip used to break Soviet blockade in 1948 to become hub for German capital's cultural life

An aerial view of Berlin's Tempelhof airport. Photograph: Arnd Wiegmann/Reuters

One of Europe's first city airports, Tempelhof, made history when western allies used it to break the Soviet blockade of West Berlin in 1948. But since its closure in 2008, politicians in the German capital have been unsure what to do with it.

Now the site is set to be transformed from a historic monument to a hub of historic learning: on Wednesday the city senate unveiled two possible designs for a new central library adjacent to the airport's disused landing strip.

If either of the designs is realised, the building will be intended to become a rival to Paris's Pompidou Centre: an architectural "statement building" with 3,200 seats for readers, galleries, event spaces, restaurants and a children's library. The iconic airport will be reborn as a vibrant focal point for the city's notoriously scattered cultural life.

One design, by Stuttgart-based agency Kohlmayer Oberst, has been likened to a "concrete spaceship" by the Berlin newspaper die Tageszeitung, echoing the stretched shape of the old terminal, which will remain. Architect Jens Oberst told the Guardian: "I am not normally into grand gestures, but such a historic setting can take it."

The second design, picked from 40 submissions, has been created by Zurich-based architect MaO and is described by the Berliner Zeitung as a "glass crystal".

The city senate will choose between the proposals early next year, with building work set to start in 2016 and take five years at an estimated cost of €270m (£225m). Critics have already suggested the final sum is likely to be almost double that prediction, at a minimum of €500m.

Berlin's senator for urban development, Regula Lüscher, told the Guardian that the new building – which would bring the America Memorial Library and the municipal library on Breite Strasse together under one roof – would become "an education centre open to people from across the social spectrum". Its construction would be swiftly followed by student accommodation and affordable housing, of which 50% would cost less than €8 per square metre.

The project is not without its critics. Opposition politicians from the Greens and Die Linke have suggested the library is a vanity project of the mayor, Klaus Wowereit, and will be used mainly to draw businesses on to land that currently sits vacant.

"If you want to build a library for the people, why not build it where people are?" said Alice Ströver, a former secretary for culture in the Berlin senate.

The proposed cultural centre already has high expectations to meet. Berlin's existing central libraries draw 5,000 visitors a day, but culture senator André Schmitz predicts that the new building will attract twice as many – approximately 3.5 million a year, roughly equal to the numbers at the Pompidou Centre, which hosts a viewing platform for tourists in the heart of the French capital.

The British Library at St Pancras, London, which, unlike Berlin's, requires membership but serves as a legal deposit library for the entire country, receives around 4,000 visitors a day.

Raising the stakes even higher, the Berlin senate plans to keep the library open 16 hours every day of the year, which would mean circumventing the current law under which libraries and shops shut on Sundays.

Aside from its political adversaries, many residents of the neighbouring Neukölln and Schöneberg districts oppose the library.

Since the airport's closure in 2010, Tempelhof Park has become a popular space for dog walkers, kite flyers and inline skaters. A petitionfor a referendum to keep the park as it is has so far gathered 103,000 signatures.

"As Berlin is getting more and more densely built up, we desperately need green spaces like this," said the petition's initiator, Margarete Heitmüller. If enough signatures are collected by 13 January, a referendum will need to be held next summer, threatening to derail the project altogether.

Wowereit's other big building project, the new Berlin Brandenburg airport, is already hampered by three years of delays and will cost at least three times the original estimate.

They may need the old runway after all.

> via TheGuardian