A little about Berlin architecture... I'm almost embarrassed to say this, but Craig and I took a morning to look at a rather small niche of architecture: industrial architecture. Yes, that would be factory buildings. It turns out that an interesting (I use the word advisedly, understanding that most people would not use that word to describe this) shift in how factory buildings are designed and built occurred in Berlin in the early 1900s. Here's a picture of a factory building designed and constructed in Berlin around 1905:
It really doesn't look much like a factory, does it? It could be a school, an office building or even an apartment. (In fact, I think it has been converted to a school.) At the time the only style of industrial architecture was this. Its motto could have been: "Make a factory look like anything but a factory."
In 1909, Peter Behrens designed the first factory that shouted: "I'm a factory!" It's also in Berlin, a 10-minute S-bahn ride away from the building shown above. Here's the facade of that building:
And one side wall:
Now this building loudly proclaims its purpose. By designing a factory building to be a factory, Behrens was able to focus on making it a much more efficient building. Steel structure meant he could incorporate glass walls. Glass walls meant lots of light. The steel structure also meant that interior walls bore no weight, so the interior configuration could easily be changed. This design was revolutionary, and much of today's industrial architecture follows it. Seeing this revolution in the space of an hour fascinated me. This building is still in use, as a factory, by a successor of the company that commissioned Behrens to design it. Fortunately, Craig was as interested as I was, and, as always, proved a knowledgable guide.
A couple days later, Laurie and I followed that same guide down Karl Marx Allee. We'd seen a bit of this street two years ago on our first Berlin visit, and I really wanted to see it in greater detail. Again, architecture brought us to this place.
Post-World War II, all of Berlin was in ruins (some neighborhoods had 70% of their buildings completely destroyed). Housing had to be built quickly. In 1950, the Soviet-run government of East Germany started building apartments, and building them quickly, and at the same time, decided to make Stalin-Allee (later renamed Karl Marx Allee) a showplace. A two mile stretch of the Allee was designed to be a showplace of Soviet architecture and living. The first buildings were assigned to Hermann Henselmann who was a great fan of what was known as "wedding cake" architecture. Here is the first building designed by Henselmann and built at the start of Stalin-Allee:
Some later buildings on the Allee:
The style was named for the wedding-cake-like decorations on the top and sides. Joe Stalin loved this building style, and it became common in many Iron Curtain cities.
Two things ended its popularity. First, it was more expensive and took longer to build, and time and money were in short supply. Secondly, Stalin died, and was quickly shown to have been a murderous (to say the least) dictator and went quickly out of favor. By 1955, East Germany was throwing up the apartment buildings for which it was known: ugly, primitive, and shoddy. But the wedding-cake buildings of Stalin/Karl Marx Allee remain; restored and modernized, they are prime residential locations now. I, for one, love them.
No comments:
Post a Comment