OPEN OFFICE

Bartningallee 16, "Punkt"-Hochhaus designed by Hans Schwippert.

Conceived in 1953 and executed four years later as a response to East Berlin’s recently developed Stalinalle, the Hansa Quarter (Hansaviertel) was intended to represent, in its rejection of axial order, its park setting and its sensitivity to human scale, all that the totalitarian building projects of East Berlin were not.  It is a reminder of two conceptions of building and urbanism that faced each other in the 1950’s whose competition was at once arrested and completed by a building project far more sinister than either was capable of imagining.  As it approaches it’s fifty-second year the district, originally constructed as an exhibition, has only settled deeper into its status as a museum and showroom, the ideologies that originally governed its construction fading into historical memory.  Characterized by a serene obsolescence, the cluster of buildings by architectural greats such as Aalto, Gropius and Neimeyer speaks of all the successes and failures of the modern movements attempts to tackle to problem of large-scale communal housing.

Altonaer Straße 4-14, "Zeilen"-Hochhaus by Oscar Neimeyer

As a normative and universal solution to Berlin’s housing crunch following the Second World War the Hansaviertel ultimately proved unaffordable and ideologically unacceptable.  The cost of hiring star architects to design a multitude of unique arcadian housing blocks across the city was prohibitively high and the forty four acre park setting could not be replicated wholesale in any other neighborhood without expensive alteration or removal of existing infrastructure.  And while the neighborhood was constructed as a model for what the post-war city might have been (the title of the exhibition that accompanied the opening of the buildings was Stadt von morgen or City of Tomorrow) it simultaneously sought to reject the serial repetition that characterized the urban planning in the east.  Ironically had this approach been embraced and combined with other cost-cutting measures, the City of Tomorrow could very well have been the city of today.

Towers designed by (left to right) Gustav Hassenpflüg, Raymond Lopéz and Eugéne Beadouin and Hans Schwippert

Though it failed to solve the practical problems of the housing crunch, as an ideological response to the totalitarian Stalinallee, Hansaviertel was for a time successful.  Though again its ideological success presented some practical problems.  Eschewing any potentially authoritarian layout the neighborhood’s planners opted for a more playful, less rigidly organized arrangement of buildings.  The elevated and totalizing perspective offered by the chairlift which originally carried exhibition goers directly through the quarter was “wide and impressive” as a critic of the time described it.  It is a shame that the chairlift, or for that matter the mini-train or the twin armed crane which also facilitated the display of this architectural playground, had to come down after the exhibition.  The perspectives they offered were no doubt more rewarding than the experience of the plan from the ground which the same critic described as “aimless enough,” adding, “it allows good breathing space around the units but adds no particularly distinguished quality to the spaces and vistas between them.” Though the Hansa does not offer grand vistas on par with Stalinallee in the east, the experience on the ground is more personal than the alienating supra-human scale of the Soviet style boulevard.

Bartningallee 7 designed by J.H. Van den Broek and J.B. Bakema

It is the series of towers by J.H Van den Broek and J.B. Bakema, Gustav Hassenpflug and Hans Schwippert which are most successful at fusing the twin goals of broadcasting an ideological message of the future of western urbanism and building forms which fulfill the needs of the urban dweller and display a sensitivity to the role of the individual in architectural space.  The base of the tall building is where this abstract ideology of an urban image, most condensed in the highly visible upper floors, conforms and collides with material conditions on the ground and the first person perspective of the user.  The tall projects at Hansaviertel were effective in the first regard, owing to their proximity to the border with the GDR, their height, their “free form” layout, and their eclecticism, in broadcasting an image of urban space that conformed to principles of free market democracy.  At the same time their scale is not so grand as to overwhelm the user.  Each of the three towers manages, in its own way, to soften the message at the top and deliver it to the ground.  For the Hans Schwippert tower it is the bright yellows of the exterior, which lend a much-needed lift to an urban landscape that, for much of the year, finds itself drenched in low lit shades of grey.  Van den Broek and Bakema have managed this by hoisting their tower on stilts, a strategy utilized to great effect by Neimeyer as well.

Bartningallee 9 by Gustav Hassenpflüg

The visibility game played by the towers at Hansaviertel was ultimately won by the east through its construction of the Alexanderplatz Fernseheturm in 1965-1969.  It is a minor shame of urban history that the two competing visions of urban planning championed by the west and the east, never had the opportunity to properly compete on the streets of Berlin. The construction of the Wall in 1961 had the effect not only of physically dividing the city but also sharply depoliticizing the new design projects that would take place in the east and the west in the following years.  The projects that followed were, in a sense, preaching to the choir.

Ted Gordon of Lady Lovelace and the Calculator Death Machine sent these photos that he took of the space.

David and Charysse of LLATCDM (Photo: Ted Gordon)

People gather after dinner waiting for the music to start (Photo: Ted Gordon)

Late night at the Office (Photo: Ted Gordon)

View of the front desk and into the kitchen (Photo: Ted Gordon)

Small screen theater set up in the Treatment Room (Photo: Ted Gordon)