First Report: Berlin Mitte

Welcome Urbanists. I made this blog to document my observations and experiences during the 2010 Summer Academy “Architecture | Reurbanization | Sustainability ” at the Beuth Hochschule Fur Technik in Berlin. I participated in this program as an exchange student from the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, New York. The focus of the program is the challenge to create ideas for the redevelopment of a large inner-city site along the river Spree. The area had formerly been the site of the Berlin Wall. This has led the two neighborhoods adjacent to the site, Friedrichshain (in former East Berlin) and Kreuzberg (in former West Berlin), to orient themselves away from the river, in a most introvert kind of way. Now that the wall has come down, we face the challenge to re-orient the two areas more towards the river, and indeed to enliven the waterfront after years of neglect. But before we dive into that, first I have some other observations to share with you. During our guided tour, we explored the centrally-located Mitte neighborhood. The area has a building height restriction of 22 meters. Because of this, developers have started to built a number of floors underground to maximize floorspace and profit. Because when you built nine floors above and four floors underground, you kind of have a short (incognito) high-rise. The photo below shows a pedestrian mall that is situated underground. The pedestrian mall runs beneath three buildings and thus effectively connects them underground. It runs from tacky middle-class stores below the first building, to fancy chique French boutiques below the third building, which features a sort of oval-shaped opening in its interior around which a warehouse has been built.

The Galleries Lafayette

The exterior facade of this glass building, however, is disturing the streetwall, which mostly features stone facades. This disturbance has led to further regulations, which now ban glass facades in order to maintain consistency in Mitte’s streetscapes. This type of regulation is Berlin’s equivalent of the Dutch “Welstandscommissie”, a local government body monitoring urban development and enacting regulations to ensure architectural consistency in the local streetscapes. It would suit Brooklyn well to enact similar regulations along the brownstone belt, in order to preserve our beloved tree-lined streets.

Streetscape in Berlin Mitte

More thoughts and observations from Berlin and beyond will follow in the coming days.