As a major center of iconic postwar architecture, Berlin has featured frequently in the Blue Crow Media catalog, with various offerings covering the city’s Modernist and Brutalist architecture, as well as its fascinating Cold War-era U-Bahn stations. Brutalist Berlin, out this month, transforms and expands the corresponding map into a proper full-length book, which serves equally well as both an on-the-ground travel guide and reference book for armchair travelers and scholars.
The book format allows the author, architectural historian Felix Torkar, more room to present the histories and unique details of the featured buildings, as well as to develop a compelling argument for Berlin being a singular city in the history of Brutalist architecture. The introduction explains how the city’s position as a Cold War flashpoint led to an architectural paradox: while Berlin was a showpiece and investment-magnet for both the Eastern and Western powers controlling it, both sides of the city were nonetheless subject to chronic shortages of building supplies, funds, and in many cases, experienced architects and builders.
These conflicting trends were the impetus for a decades-long creative streak that saw architects and builders doing more with less, and young upstart firms being handed massive projects that would have been unthinkable in other cities and eras. The path of the Wall meant that many historic educational and arts institutions ended up in the East, requiring their doubling in the West and resulting in an explosion of Brutalist gems such as the Freie Universität, Akademie der Künste, and Deutsche Oper. Across the Wall in the East, the lukewarm-to-nonexistent support for any form of religious expression meant that churches damaged or destroyed in the war needed to be rebuilt quickly, cheaply, and with available materials, and often required support from religious organizations in the West.
The buildings featured in the book include not only a wide range of neighborhoods and usages, but also a range of physical scale that is both unusual and welcome for books on Brutalist architecture. There are plenty of monumental buildings (the blocks-long Autobahnüberbauung Schlangenbader Straße and towering high-rise Gropiushaus, for example) alongside a good number of smaller structures located outside the city center. These include the Binder Wohnhaus in Grunewald, the Wohnregal (“housing shelf”) on a small tree-lined street in Moabit, and Haus Plettner in Spandau, supposedly the city’s only example of a villa built entirely in exposed concrete.
And fans of wilder and showier Brutalist structures need not fear, as the book includes some of the city’s best-known architectural oddities, among them the dual-sphere Isothermische Kugellabor (above) in Adlershof, the multicolored Bierpinsel of Steglitz, and the pyramidal battleship-esque Zentrale Tierlaboratorien (AKA “Mäusebunker”) with its almost comically hostile gun-like protrusions—a building particularly close to the author’s heart, as he was part of recent (successful) efforts to prevent its demolition. While the exclusion of the ICC, arguably one of the crown jewels of Berlin Brutalism, is a bit of a head-scratcher, the structure is mentioned throughout the book, and is clearly part of the greater Modernist patchwork of the city. Ultimately, as Torkar reminds us, designations such as Brutalism are simply
…a useful lens through which to view a much broader set of buildings that fit the description and design philosophy […] I find it is most useful to see Brutalism and Modernism as terms that allow us to create connections, detect patterns and gain a critical understanding of architecture.
Brutalist Berlin
Dr Felix Torkar
Blue Crow Media
Softcover, 144 pages, €27.95
