Fire at Franco Stella’s Berliner Stadtschloss

On the morning of April 8th, an explosion on Museum Island in Berlin caused a fire at the Humboldt Forum, which is still under construction. The project for the ‟Berlin castle” is the result of a 2008 competition won by Franco Stella; the building was for more than 5 centuries the imperial palace of the city, later demolished in the 1970s, has been redesigned as a museum venue. According to the New York Times, the fire was put out thanks to the intervention of 80 firefighters, but not avoiding damage to the structure, in particular to one of the entrances to the museum, as well as an injured person.

The project had already sparked controversy due to the philological and conservative approach of the reconstruction, which was then exacerbated by the continuous delays in the construction site and the costs that rose progressively over time. The museum was supposed to open last year but the opening was postponed to September 2020.

On this occasion, we anticipate the publication of Jonathan Griffin’s contribution to Domus, n. 1047, in the section ‟About the cover”. In the June issue, the building will be protagonist of the cover by artist Thomas Demand, under the guest editor David Chipperfield.

The Berliner Stadtschloss stood in the centre of Berlin from the 15th century, and was home to successive Kings of Prussia and German emperors. In 1950 its war-damaged remains were dynamited by the East German government who decreed it a symbol of Prussian imperialism. The empty space where it stood was renamed Marx-Engels-Platz. In the 1970s, the impressive modernist Palast der Republik rose on the site, home to the GDR Volkskammer (the lower parliament) alongside a multi-use culture and leisure centre. After it was found to be contaminated with asbestos, it was closed in 1990, and finally demolished in 2006. Since the reunification of Germany debates have ensued about the reconstruction of the Stadtschloss. Two factions emerged: those that favoured a refurbishment of the Palast der Republik incorporating a recreation of one façade of the Stadtschloss, and those that argued for a complete reconstruction of the Stadtschloss. As early as 1993, the group lobbying for a total reconstruction erected a 1:1 scale photographic mock-up of two of the building’s facades on scaffolding. In 2007 the German Bundestag agreed that three sides of the Stadtschloss would be recreated around a modernist core, which would follow the layout of the original building but with none of its elaborate ornamentation or finishes. Thomas Demand has depicted the conjunction of these two divergent approaches. He is especially drawn to this project because almost all the information about the original building is derived from an archive of around 40 early photogrammetric images on large glass plates, taken between 1885 and 1920. The shadow of the past always falls across the present.

Opening image: via Wikicommons/Ziko