Designing beside Mies. The Architecture of the City in the Berliner Kulturforum: an Ongoing Challenge

With the Berliner Kulturforum Hans Scharoun realized, in the late 1950s, his urban vision of Stadtlandschaft (city-landscape). The historical spatial relationships of this area of Berlin were reversed; the buildings no longer defined the public space, but were designed as independent objects in the vast open space that surrounded them. It was here that Mies van der Rohe's project for the Bacardi headquarters in Santiago de Cuba was finally realized, taking shape in the Neue Nationalgalerie. In the Kulturforum, where the historical context played no role, a building originally conceived for Cuba could fit into a central area of Berlin. Despite debates against such an urban concept, the logic of the composition in the Kulturforum did not change, and the projects built in the following decades did not succeed in restoring urban coherence. In the 1980s, the Internationale Bauausstellung Berlin (IBA) announced a competition to expand the Neue Nationalgalerie and integrate residential buildings into the area. The two IBA projects built in the Kulturforum, James Stirling's Science Center and Ackermann & Partner's comb-shaped building, also seem to lack a coherent relationship to their surroundings. Neither do they refer to the historical urban fabric, even though this was supposed to be the IBA's design guideline. The ensemble appears as a group of architectural fragments, with Mies's building playing the leading role. This essay traces the events and debates surrounding the development and completion of the Kulturforum, taking into account both the expectations of the competitions and the current situation of the area. In particular, the essay focuses on the southern sector of the Kulturforum and considers its future prospects in view of the forthcoming realization of the Museum of the Twentieth Century.