Open Access

Since the 1950s, Berlin’s centre has been a laboratory for urban reconstruction. After the projects designed and built in the Berlin divided by the Wall between the 1960s and 80s and the ones designed after the reunification of the city in 1989, the central areas of the German capital are still today open construction sites and the subject of debates, competitions, and new projects. The paper deals with reconstructions of these central areas focusing on the interventions which concentrated on the relationship between history and new projects, considering the semantic difference that exists in the German language between Rekonstruktion – understood as the faithful reconstruction of something that existed before, either a building or a broader portion of the city – and Wiederaufbau – more generically, the new construction of a destroyed building or district. Our paper focuses on the urban debates and projects that have addressed Berlin’s central medieval and baroque districts since 1979. The text is structured in three chronological sections: 1970s-80s, 1990s-2000s and today. East and West are hereby analyzed in the same way, from a spatial and morphological point of view, without deeply delving into socio-political and administrative issues. By showing case studies that are representative of different strategies for reconstruction, with this paper we ask where the boundary between reconstruction and new design is and whether there are projects in which theoretical reflections on continuity with the past have been successfully translated into contemporary design. By expanding on the recent past of the reconstruction of Berlin’s centre, this paper raises issues and questions that are crucial for new projects.

On the eve of the celebration of the 90th anniversary of 1929’s CIAM, the city of Frankfurt is again the center of international attention thanks to a project related to housing and the city, which represents, however, the opposite of the experience of Das neue Frankfurt. I refer to the Dom-Römer, the heart of the historical city, destroyed by bombing during WWII, replaced in the post-war period by the Technisches Rathaus, and now “rebuilt” in total adherence to the historical parcel plan as a new residential and commercial district. Regarding mass public housing, with minimal individual dwelling cells and standardized construction conceived by Ernst May, an equally public intervention is now opposed, but with a few individual houses and owned apartments for upper-middle-class customers, unique in their exceptionality, constructed with traditional techniques and finished with craftsmanship, case by case. The modernistic idea of low-density monofunctional satellite neighborhoods on the edge of the consolidated city, based on repetition of typed elements and on correct orientation of buildings in order to grant air and light, at the expenses of a clear definition of public space, is replaced today, in the core the city, by the medieval plan, with its irregular parcels and the narrow, winding dark alleys, high density and multifunctional buildings, and a strongly characterized public space. The positions are of course diametrically opposed also with respect to the roof dispute, which animated architects at the beginning of the 20th century: strictly flat roofs in the new Frankfurt of the 1920s and pitched roofs in the gabled houses of the ancient contemporary Frankfurt. From the parallel between these two experiences, so different from one another that they are almost incomparable, important elements emerge to understand the current debate on the architecture of the European city, particularly in Germany.