It’s a miracle! It opened!
Berlin Brandenburg Airport 2.0
In July 2013, when I was a at the beginning of my PhD journey, I went to an academic Roundtable Talk at the Zentralinstitut für Kunstgeschichte of the University of Munich, Germany. The talk was about ubiquitous architecture. I went there because of two speakers: Meinhard von Gerkan and Werner Sobek. The latter is a world renowned engineer and architect and collaborator of Helmut Jahn, with whom he designed Bangkok Suvarnabhumi Airport (2006).
And Meinhard von Gerkan is the architect of the Berlin Airports Tegel and Brandenburg International (BER, aka Willy Brandt), of Stuttgart Airport and many other train stations and airport collaborations in Germany and China.
Meinhard von Gerkan was very polite when I talked to him about my airport thesis. We exchanged business cards and he wished me luck. At the time back then, von Gerkan was very much under attack for the failure of his landmark Berlin airport, which was supposed to be inaugurated in June 2012. So we talked about my thesis and airport typology in general, in order to avoid the elephant in the room.
In a nutshell: BER was supposed to open in 2010, then 2011, 2012, then it was postponed every year for various reasons until now. The inauguration was even shelved indefinitely for a time, for there were inadequate fire/fume fighting vent ducts and many more faults within the building premises. Unheard of for German standards – the country that is as precise and diligent as a cuckoo clock. That clock by the way is German, not Swiss. Harry Lime (Orson Welles, Graham Greene) was wrong.
What had happened to von Gerkan was similar to what had happened to Herzog & de Meuron’s Elbphilharmonie. There were delays, the costs exploded, there were political fights, the costs skyrocketed, the politicians blamed the contractors who blamed the architects, who were not to blame; everyone lawyered up. In the end, there was a showdown like in The Untouchables. Not exactly, the last one is exaggerated.
I honestly side with the architects. The fault is in the system, outsourcing, contractors, the state, nepotism, politics. A few mayors, too, who tried to make BER their self-realization. But now, after recounting the votes, there is no fraud. The winner is: The airport! And its vice-president, the architect.
The terminal is indeed esthetically impressive, serene and composed. The flat-roofed cantilevered steel and glass building with its colonnades fits well into Berlin’s Hauptstadtarchitektur – the architecture of Germany’s capital – which has been overhauled during the last three decades by representative, yet unpretentious structures and the restoration of parliament buildings like the Sony Center (Murphy/Jahn & Werner Sobek), Berlin Hauptbahnhof (gmp – von Gerkan’s office), the restored Reichstag (Norman Foster) etc.
The axial layout of the flat terminal building and cantilevered roof remind me of Mies van der Rohe’s Nationalgalerie (1968), as well situated in Berlin. BER’s colonnades were designed to form the transition between architecture and landscape and between buildings and the open space. Von Gerkan’s terminal is an ode to modernism. While the Miesian catchphrase about modernism was “less is more”, and that catchphrase itself may be 60 years old, in von Gerkan’s BER terminal we understand how it perfectly describes the perfection of Miesian minimalism: the symmetrical, horizontal layout with glass and steel colonnades, and especially the glass curtain walls.
Courtesy of
Mister No, CC BY 3.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0>, via Wikimedia Commons
Against all odds, BER was finally inaugurated on 31 October 2020, after Tegel closed down forever. Tegel, built in 1974 by von Gerkan as well, was beloved by frequent fliers for its unique layout. Tegel’s hexagonal shape allowed for passengers, taxis and greeters to drive into its open air interior, where the passengers could load/unload from the cars right in front of their respective gate. This was one of the shortest landside/airside walks of all the airports in the world.
A very similar, though round, and not hexagonal, airport terminal was the Pan Am Worldport at JFK, designed in 1956 by Walther Prokosch.
Though cars could not drive into the terminal like at Tegel, at Pan Am’s Worldport, which was decommissioned in 2014 due to impracticality concerning growth and expansion, passengers in the terminal had a very short walking distance towards their gates. The Pan Am Worldport was one of the iconic terminals of the jet age, together with its imminent neighbor, the TWA Flight Center.
There is another iconic airport in Berlin, Tempelhof. Berlin Tempelhof Airport was permanently shut down for operations in 2008, and has been housing around 3000 refugees since the refugee and migration crisis in Europe from 2015 onwards. It shall be presented in another post at another time.
Sources:
Berlin Brandenburg Airport
Courtesy of
Fridolin freudenfett (Peter Kuley), CC BY-SA 3.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0>, via Wikimedia Commons
Pan Am Worldport, Courtesy of Jon Proctor (GFDL 1.2 <http://www.gnu.org/licenses/old-licenses/fdl-1.2.html> or GFDL 1.2 <http://www.gnu.org/licenses/old-licenses/fdl-1.2.html>), via Wikimedia Commons
Neue Nationalgalerie Berlin
Courtesy of
Mister No, CC BY 3.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0>, via Wikimedia Commons
https://www.spiegel.de/spiegel/print/d-97110561.html
https://www.gmp.de/en/projekte/512/berlin-brandenburg-willy-brandt-airport
