Europe Center

Europe Center
View of the office tower
Data
place	Berlin-Charlottenburg
builder	Helmut Hentrich , Hubert Petschnigg , Fritz Eller , Erich Moser, Robert Walter
Architectural style	Modern
Construction year	1963-1965
height	103 m
Floor space	80,000 m²
Coordinates	52 ° 30 '16 " N , 13 ° 20' 20" E Coordinates: 52 ° 30 '16 " N , 13 ° 20' 20" E52.504444444444 13.338888888889
particularities
rotating Mercedes star , multiple modifications and expansions

The Europa-Center is a building complex with a striking high-rise on Breitscheidplatz in the Berlin district of Charlottenburg . Erected from 1963 to 1965, it soon became a landmark of West Berlin alongside the Memorial Church . With an eaves height of 86 meters , the office tower was the tallest skyscraper in the city for several years until the Fritz-Erler-Allee 120 residential building in Gropiusstadt was completed . The entire complex is now a listed building .

The history

View from Tauentzienstrasse to Breitscheidplatz , 1960. The Europacenter was built on the site on the right.

On the site of today's Europa-Center in the New West of Berlin, the Romanisches Café has been located in the second Romanisches Haus since 1916 - among other things a meeting place for writers, painters and theater people. After a bombing raid in World War II on November 21, 1943, the house was in ruins. After the end of the war, the ruins were cleared away and the area leveled. For almost two decades, the property was used only temporarily: catchers , circus people and missionaries took turns in makeshift buildings, plus there were snack bars and a temporary cinema with erotic entertainment films . A local newspaper saw the area as an "eyesore on Berlin's business card".

The construction

The Europa Center in the 1970s

Europe Center

Soon after the city was divided by the construction of the Berlin Wall in 1961, the picture changed. New buildings were politically encouraged and promoted - as symbols of the will to live and the viability of West Berlin. The Breitscheidplatz , a central square of the western half of the city, required in addition to the recently completed Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church further appreciation. The Berlin businessman and investor Karl Heinz Pepper was the client . He commissioned Helmut Hentrich and Hubert Petschnigg to plan and build an office and shopping center based on the American model. The architect of the new memorial church, Egon Eiermann , was involved as artistic advisor .

Construction work on the Europa Center began in November 1963 and was concluded with the inauguration by the then Governing Mayor Willy Brandt on April 2, 1965. The result was a complex of buildings of glass and steel of 80,000 sq meters with different buildings: a two-storey base with basement and two courtyards, a cinema building, a hotel, an apartment house and the slim box-shaped office tower (Office Tower) with 86 meters height (total height: 103 meters), 21 floors and 13,000 m² of office space. Until the completion of the residential high- rise Ideal in 1969, this urban- dominant and much-cited building was the tallest high-rise in Berlin and the second office high-rise in Germany after Düsseldorf with its Thyssen high-rise . The construction cost a total of 72 million marks (adjusted for purchasing power in today's currency: around 146 million euros).

Since its inception, numerous renovations and modernizations have served the purpose of increasing the attractiveness and thus the commercial success of the Europa-Center. The inner courtyards were given roofs, and the artificial ice rink in one of the courtyards was given up in 1974. The operators gave the following figures for the year 2005: around 100 shops and restaurants, between 20,000 and 40,000 visitors a day. In 2007, after extensive renovation work, the largest Berlin branch of the electronics chain Saturn with 10,000 m² of retail space was opened on the site of the former Royal Palast cinema . The Royal Palace , which opened at the same time as the Europa Center in 1965, housed one of the world's largest widescreen screens (32 m × 13 m), had to close in 2004 due to the changed theater landscape due to large cinema centers.

Others

A landmark of the Europa Center is the Mercedes star, visible from afar, on the roof of the office tower. It weighs three tons, has an outer diameter of ten meters and turns around twice a minute, but automatically turns into the wind in a storm. It is the largest rotating Mercedes star and the largest rotating neon system in the world. At night, the star is illuminated with the help of a custom-made product made of 681 fluorescent tubes, each one meter long, at 6000 volts high voltage. The star can be turned over for maintenance work.

The Porcupines , a Berlin cabaret ensemble , have had their venue in the Europa Center since 1965.

On February 26, 1973, the base structure was badly damaged by a major fire that had occurred during roof work.

The clock of the flowing time in the western inner courtyard shows the passage of minutes and hours every twelve hours. Colored water flows in a system of glass spheres arranged in towers and communicating tubes and indirectly enables the time to be displayed. The entire system is always emptied at 1 a.m. and 1 p.m. - only the hour display remains visible - and the cycle starts again.

The Berlin clock (also incorrectly called a set theory clock ), developed by Dieter Binninger for the Berlin Senate , has been at the tourist information office in the Europa Center on Budapester Strasse since 1996 . Originally, this was between 1975 and 1995 on the median strip of Kurfürstendamm corner Uhlandstraße .

In a water basin in the second courtyard stood the lotus fountain by the Parisian artists Bernard and François Baschet, a water feature with optical and acoustic elements. It was commissioned for the staircase hall of the New National Gallery and was installed there in 1975. As early as 1981 it was considered dispensable there, and in 1982 the museum gave it to the Europa-Center as a free permanent loan . It was removed during renovation work in 2012. A café was built in its place.

In analogy to the Europa-Center, the Kö -Center was built in Düsseldorf from 1965–1967 and the Bonn-Center in Bonn in 1968/1969 , the latter also bearing a Mercedes star. For decades, a well-known venue for the cabaret industry, the Pantheon Theater, was located in the Bonn Center . The Bonn Center was blown up in March 2017.

At the upstream low-rise stands since 1987 by Heinz Mack created, about 2 m × 2 m wide square lighting column with upward taper point specular, transparent and goldgetöntem color filter glass. By 2002 it was illuminated by 4,550 computer-controlled halogen lamps in different colors. When the column was refurbished in 2012, they were replaced by modern LED lights . At Henriettenplatz , at the other end of Kurfürstendamm in Halensee , there is a bronze obelisk by Heinz Mack, which was also erected in 1987 for the 750th anniversary of Berlin .

For the 50th anniversary of the Europa-Center, the history of Berlin from the point of view of the shopping center was published by Hagen Liebing , the former bassist of the band Die Ärzte , under the title Berlins Weg in die Wolken . Here were eyewitnesses as Ulli cell and Hans-Werner Olm to speak.

In the espionage thriller The Quiller Memorandum - Danger from the Dark (1966), the then newly built Europa Center houses a British secret service center on one of the upper, still vacant floors.