Academy of Arts (Berlin-Hansaviertel)

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The main entrance to the exhibition building. In front the sculpture The Reclining by Henry Moore

The location at Hanseatenweg 10 of the Academy of Arts in Berlin is an ensemble of buildings and horticultural facilities in the Hansaviertel district . The complex was built during the Cold War for the branch of the academy, which was newly founded in West Berlin in 1954 , and was completed in 1960. It is completely under monument protection .

About history

In 1696 the Electoral Academy of the Arts was founded. The name and location of the institution changed several times in the following centuries. From 1907 to 1938 it was based as the Prussian Academy of the Arts in the Palais Arnim on Pariser Platz in Berlin-Mitte , which was converted and expanded by Ernst von Ihne , and then in the Kronprinzenpalais . As a result of its destruction by an air raid , she moved it on April 13, 1945 to the building of the Hochschule der Künste in Charlottenburg in what would later become the British sector in West Berlin .

From there, after the end of the war, their “commissioning administrator” (since 1938) Georg Schumann and Alexander Amersdorffer (1875–1946), who had succeeded Ludwig Justi in 1909 as “First Permanent Secretary”, revived the academy. With the death of Amersdorffers in August 1946, however, this initiative ended without result.

In the same month, Adolf Jannasch began, on behalf of the SED- dominated Berlin magistrate , to prepare the "re-establishment" of the Academy of the Arts. Since November 1946, the German Central Administration for National Education of the Soviet Occupation Zone (DVV), from which the Ministry of National Education later emerged in the GDR , supported the all-German project. With this in mind, Prime Minister Otto Grotewohl opened the German Academy of the Arts on March 24, 1950 . Its first president was Arnold Zweig . Until 1977, the “provisional seat” of the academy was in the “House for Medical Further Education” of the Charité at Robert-Koch-Platz 7 in Berlin-Mitte. The planned reconstruction of the Palais Arnim, which had been partially destroyed since 1945 and is now in East Berlin and is now a listed building, did not take place, but was demolished in 1960. However, until the end of the GDR , the East Berlin Academy used the undestroyed studio and exhibition building on the rear of the property, which was enlarged by Albert Speer until 1944 . After eliminating these extensions, the Ihne building has been integrated into the new building of the united academy on Pariser Platz, which was completed in 2005.

The self-governing Academy of the Arts was established in West Berlin in 1954 with its President Hans Scharoun , sponsored by the State of Berlin . The academies in East and West claimed to continue the tradition of the earlier academy. Despite great differences in structures and artistic conceptions, contacts between the two institutions existed in the following decades, which were due to personal relationships and double memberships.

Inner courtyard on the upper floor
Memorial plaque for Henry Reichhold

The Akademie der Künste (West) initially had its administrative headquarters in a villa in Berlin-Dahlem . Exhibitions, concerts, etc. took place at different locations in West Berlin, there was no money for a separate event building. That changed by a private foundation of one million US dollars for the construction of a new academy building. The financier was the industrialist Henry H. Reichhold, a native of Berlin who had lived in the Hansaviertel until 1918 and emigrated to the United States in 1924 . Concerns of the state of Berlin about the follow-up costs were allayed by an additional foundation with which Henry Reichhold also financed a large part of the academy events of the first eight years.

After the fall of the Berlin Wall , both academies voted against a hasty merger. After several years of sometimes violent disputes within the academies and on the part of politics, repeatedly accompanied by protests and members resigning, the merger took place in 1993. The historic location on Pariser Platz was designated as the headquarters of the academy , and the necessary new building was occupied in spring 2005. The academy retained its location on Hanseatenweg as a location for exhibitions and diverse cultural events. The existing apartments and studios are made available to artists for their work. Ingeborg Bachmann , Samuel Beckett , Alexander Calder , Paul Celan , Walter Gropius , Hans Mayer , Henry Moore (who made the sculpture Die Liegende in front of the entrance), George Tabori and many others lived here for a long time in the early years . Today, young international artists find suitable conditions for living and working in the “Young Academy” funding program on Hanseatenweg.

The building complex

The buildings for the Akademie der Künste (West) are in the Hansaviertel at the Großer Tiergarten . In 1957 the International Building Exhibition Berlin ( Interbau ) took place here, as a demonstration of modern architecture with a western style and as a counter-design to the architectural gesture of the former Stalinallee (today: Karl-Marx-Allee ) in East Berlin. The new academy building on this area was not planned at the time. It could only be realized after the funding was regulated by the Reichhold's special purpose foundation. The State of Berlin has now made suitable land available in the Hansaviertel. Werner Düttmann was the lead architect , in collaboration with the architect Sabine Schumann and others. The facility was opened on June 18, 1960. The building complex is a representative example of brutalism ; it fits seamlessly into the architectural quality of the Hansaviertel, for which Düttmann had previously designed the library building. The architect became director of the Academy's architecture department and was its president from 1971 until his death in 1983. In a speech, the Academy President Klaus Staeck , who has been in office since 2006, described Düttmann's intention to contrast the public character of the Academy with an element of the private:

“For this purpose Düttmann and Rossow [the garden architect ] once laid out this house like a secular monastery, with corridors and gardens and apartments, as a place of retreat. A kind of intellectual and architectural anti-event concept. "

- Klaus Staeck: The beautiful one in the zoo

Düttmann himself called his building a "clear, unpathetic box".

  • Staircase to the exhibition rooms

  • Interior upstairs

  • Studio building, north side

The spatial program resulted from the specifications of the academy for its future work. Düttmann then developed not a single, closed structure, but an ensemble of three, also externally clearly different components. Facing the street is a light cube for the exhibition, with a foyer , garden courtyard and workshops on the ground floor; on the upper floor, three exhibition halls are grouped around a planted inner courtyard. To the south of it stands the 'studio', a multi-purpose building made of red brick with sloping, deeply drawn green copper roofs , designed for lectures, films, theater performances and similar events, plus a cinema library . A little away from the public area, in the east of the site, a five-storey building was built with studios and apartments for guests, with conference rooms, a library and offices for the internal work of the academy. The three parts of the complex are connected by foyers and glazed corridors. Handcrafted bricks, exposed aggregate concrete with the addition of white river pebbles, slate panels and Brazilian pine wood were used as common, distinctive materials .

Walter Rossow , who was already in charge of the design of the green spaces in the Hansaviertel, took over the planning of the green spaces in the academy and in its immediate vicinity. He determined the species-rich planting for the inner and outer courtyards of the academy and designed the nearby paths with their irregular surface made of rough slate slabs. He understood his work as a process in which plants change their appearance over the years.

Redevelopment

Towards the end of the 1980s, after around 30 years of intensive use, extensive renovation measures were planned. After the academies merged, however, all free funds for construction work were initially used in the new building on Pariser Platz. It was not until 2009 that there was financial leeway for the necessary work on Hanseatenweg, which was carried out in 2011. The focus of the renovation was on the complexes of energy and fire protection as well as event technology . The total costs were around 6.2 million euros. At the beginning of September 2011, the academy building on Hanseatenweg was reopened with a major program on John Cage .

literature

  • Werner Durth , Günter Behnisch : Berlin. Pariser Platz. New building for the Academy of Arts , Jovis, Berlin 2005, ISBN 3-936314-36-5
  • Academy of the Arts (Ed.): "50 Years of the Academy of the Arts on Hanseatenweg". An exhibition manuscript. 2010.

Web links

Commons : Akademie der Künste Berlin (Hanseatenweg)  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ On this and also on the following section see Werner Durth, Günter Behnisch: Berlin. Pariser Platz. New building for the Akademie der Künste , Jovis, Berlin 2005, ISBN 3-936314-36-5 , pp. 84–94.
  2. ^ Werner Durth, Günter Behnisch: Berlin. Pariser Platz. New building for the Academy of Arts , Jovis, Berlin 2005, ISBN 3-936314-36-5 , p. 106.
  3. ^ Alfonso A. Narvaez: Henry H. Reichhold Dies at 88; Founder of a Chemical Company. In: The New York Times , December 13, 1989.
  4. ↑ mth: Democracy in exposed aggregate concrete. In: Die Welt , June 17, 2000.
  5. ^ Academy of the Arts (ed.): "50 Years of the Academy of the Arts on Hanseatenweg". An exhibition manuscript, 2010, p. 5.
  6. ^ Academy of the Arts (ed.): "50 Years of the Academy of the Arts on Hanseatenweg". An exhibition manuscript, 2010, p. 3.
  7. ↑ The beautiful one in the zoo. In: the daily newspaper , June 12, 2010
  8. ↑ The sleeping beauty. In: Der Tagesspiegel , May 8, 2002
  9. ↑ Call for tenders for the partial renovation and modernization of the Akademie der Künste, Hanseatenweg 10  ( page no longer available , search in web archives )@1@ 2Template: Toter Link / www.competitionline.de


Coordinates: 52 ° 31 '4.3 "  N , 13 ° 20' 45.9"  E