Berlin Modernism. Public Buildings of Culture, Science and Education
Abstrakt
The legacy of Berlin Modernism is not limited to the social housing estates and residential complexes of the Weimar Republic, which were inscribed as World Heritage Sites in 2008 or scheduled for extension in 2023. But the new residential neighbourhoods represent the exceptionally high social and design quality standards and the unique achievements of Berlin’s reform efforts in the 1920s more clearly than any other built heritage of the interwar period, both in terms of their size and number as well as of their urban planning and architectural quality.Compared to the social housing complexes that surrounded the historic centre of Berlin from the imperial era (1871–1918) with a loose wreath of new housing estates in the urban expansion areas of the Greater Berlin Act (1920), one would like to attest that the school and science buildings as well as the construction of cultural institutions are only in exceptional cases outstanding significant in terms of quantity and rarely make a striking appearance in the cityscape. The visionary concept of a ‘total theatre’ by Walter Gropius and Erwin Piscator (1925) remained a utopia, a ground–breaking ‘paper architecture’.
It is also noteworthy that public school and science buildings or new cultural centres were only exceptionally oriented towards he topographical distribution of the new social housing estates.
Among those exceptions are some of the cinemas completed in the 1920s in the inner city, a few of which have even survived to this day as functioning theatres or film cinemas with adjacent residential neighbourhoods (Babylon, Schaubühne / Universum Kino). Like the construction of large cinemas and movie palaces that flourished after the 1918/19 revolution, the construction of trade union buildings with cultural and educational training space was one of the great achievements of Berlin’s interwar modernism.
After the National Socialists assumed power in 1933, the planning of scientific buildings and campus facilities was to see an enormous upswing and open up new terrain on the outskirts or outside the big capital, but came to a standstill with the war economy and armaments industry of the Second World War. Mendelsohn’s world–famous architectural icon of the expressionist Einstein Tower (1920–22) near Berlin remains an exception to this day.
Słowa kluczowe:
Berlin Modernism, world heritage, theatre, cinema, school, university, Max Taut, Erich MendelsohnInformacje szczegółówe
- Numer
- Tom 1 Nr 1 (2025): MEMG
- Dział
- Research Articles
- Opublikowane
- 2025-11-30
- Bibliografia
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