Jesse Simon explores Berlin’s controversial conference centre, inside and out…
For many born in the second half of the twentieth century, the future seemed as though it was going to be an exciting world of flying cars, vast skyscrapers, space-age couture and countless gadgets that would make our lives easier. It seemed certain that by the early twenty-first century we would be able to talk to our friends on wristwatch televisions and send facsimiles of documents to offices halfway around the world as we made our daily commute to the moon.
In the third decade of the actual twenty-first century we can look back at visions of the future from the past hundred years and see that each one reflects the styles and aspirations of its own era far more than it anticipated any reality that came to pass. The industrialised future in Fritz Lang’s Metropolis embodies the anxieties of the machine age, just as the rigid formalism of 2001: A Space Odyssey bears the unmistakable stamp of the sixties.
In many visions of the future, architecture has played a central role. And in the three decades after the second world war, some architects came to believe in their position as catalysts for social change who would sweep away the remaining vestiges of the old world and create new built environments for a more enlightened way of living. Even if the reality often fell short of the artists’ renderings, a spirit of optimism inspired many post-war architects to translate their visions for the future into buildings that made a decisive break from the urban traditions of previous centuries.
Although West Berlin was geographically isolated from Western Europe, it was not immune to prevailing architectural trends, and that same spirit of optimism could once be seen throughout the city, from the old (now largely destroyed) shopping precinct of the Märkisches Viertel to the hexagonal splendour of Tegel airport. But there are few structures in Berlin—surviving or otherwise—that capture the essence of living on the cusp of the future with the same intensity as the Internationales Congress Centrum.
The ICC may have gone way over budget (some things never change), and West Berliners may have greeted it with their customary blend of perplexity and snark when it first opened in 1979—it earned a variety of spaceship-themed nicknames—but throughout the eighties and nineties it was highly regarded as one of Europe’s great conference venues. By the first decade of the new century, however, it had started to show signs of wear, and in 2014 it was retired from service with little fanfare.
Of course, a building nearly a third of a kilometre in length resembling an interstellar cruise ship moored alongside the Ringbahn doesn’t disappear quietly. Since its closure it has turned into yet another of Berlin’s architectural problems, too expensive to demolish—the cost of removing all the asbestos would be prohibitive—and too unwieldy to repurpose. Although it was used briefly as a refugee shelter and a vaccination centre, it seems doomed to an immediate future of abandonment while a succession of potential investors and lofty resurrection schemes come and go.
This is a tremendous shame as the ICC is, some four decades after it first opened, still one of the most awe-inspiring buildings in Berlin. Its extraordinary qualities were confirmed recently when the Berliner Festspiele chose it as the location for a ten day multi-media art event, which offered Berliners a chan…