Funkhaus Nalepastraße
| Funkhaus Nalepastraße | ||
|---|---|---|
 The radio house from the opposite bank of the Spree |
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| Data | ||
| place | Berlin | |
| architect | Franz Ehrlich | |
| Construction year | 1951 | |
| Coordinates | 52 ° 28 ′ 46 ″ N , 13 ° 30 ′ 0 ″ E | |
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The Funkhaus Nalepastraße is a partly listed building complex in Berlin's Treptow-Köpenick district, Oberschöneweide . From 1956 to 1990 the radio of the GDR had its seat here. Since its closure the complex has been called Funkhaus Berlin .
history
Radio in Berlin after 1945
All of the German radio programs broadcast in Berlin were initially created in the Haus des Rundfunks on Masurenallee . After the end of the Second World War, this building was located in the British sector of Berlin , corresponding to its four-power status . With the founding of the GDR , the new broadcasters Berliner Rundfunk and Deutschlandsender developed under the supervision of the Soviet occupying power , which the British no longer tolerated in Masurenallee.
A new broadcasting house for the GDR radio programs
An empty building complex of a former plywood factory in Nalepastraße , located in the Soviet sector of Berlin, was expanded into a broadcasting house from the summer of 1951. A year later, the renovation (called Block A) had progressed so far that four broadcast studios and additional recording rooms as well as the necessary switching room from 12/13. September 1952 the full broadcasting operations for the central radio programs of the GDR could be started.
In the summer of 1952, the construction of a completely new broadcasting house with music recording studios and a large broadcasting hall began on the 135,000 m² site near the Spree in the Oberschöneweide district. The architect Franz Ehrlich , among others, provided the plans for the construction . The new building was named Block B, in its foyer also were marble slabs from the New Reich Chancellery laid. In 1960, the construction of Block E began, which can be seen from afar from Rummelsburger Landstrasse, in particular through the five-story skeleton structure (ER). Behind it is a wide, flat building, block ET. T stands for technology here, because all national radio stations in the GDR were broadcasting from this part of the building. Selected acoustics experts were called in for the floor plans of these broadcast studios, and a building complex was created that was optimally built for its purposes. For example, the speaker rooms were built with two shells , even the foundations are decoupled by 4 1 ⁄ 2 cm thick Piatherm panels. The largest control room in Europe was now also here. With completion in the early 1960s and still today, the broadcast studios are considered " state of the art ". A number of service facilities followed on the site later.
On February 16, 1955, shortly before its completion, there was a major fire in Block B due to improper construction site lighting and deficiencies in fire protection , which delayed the completion of construction work in this part of the building by a year. The GDR press alleged arson by "enemies of peace".
All supraregional radio stations of the GDR - for example the German broadcaster, the Berliner Rundfunk, Radio DDR I and Radio DDR II , and later also the voice of the GDR and DT64 - now produced and broadcast from here. Programs and radio plays were recorded and records were made in the various studios and recording rooms and in the large recording room 1, which is equipped with very good acoustics. Over 5,000 people worked in Nalepastraße in the 1970s and had the services of a small town on site. This included service and utility facilities such as canteens, meeting rooms, a clinic , a bookstore , consumption (a small grocery), ice cream shop, dentist, hairdresser and sauna - collectively Block C . The GDR Broadcasting Committee, the management of the house and a few small studios have been in Block A since the new broadcasting house (Block B) went into operation. After the German reunification , the radio programs were continued by the facility under Article 36 of the Unification Treaty until December 31, 1991 and stopped at midnight on that day. The new public broadcasters MDR , NDR , ORB and SFB for (East) Berlin started broadcasting at midnight.
The radio house from 1990 to 1993
When the editorial offices and technical services finally moved out on December 31, 1991, an eventful history of an unusual property began. The house also served as a temporary location for some radio programs afterwards. The newly founded Ostdeutsche Rundfunk Brandenburg (ORB) initially produced the programs Radio Brandenburg and Rockradio B here until they moved to studios at the Potsdam-Babelsberg headquarters in mid-1993 . The public youth radio Fritz , which emerged from a cooperation between the Sender Freies Berlin (SFB) and the ORB, also experienced its first hours here from the start of the program in March 1993 until the move to Babelsberg at the end of the year. In addition, since January 1, 1992, Berliner Rundfunk 91.4 continued to produce its programs as a private broadcaster in the Funkhaus. The youth radio DT64, or from May 1, 1993 MDR Sputnik , was taken over by the Mitteldeutscher Rundfunk and continued to be produced here until the move to Halle in November 1993.
After the political change in the GDR , from June 16, 1990 to December 31, 1993, the editorial offices of DS Kultur were located in the Funkhaus in Nalepastraße.
Rediscovery of an instrument believed to be lost
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After extensive research in April 2003, the sound artist and music historian Manfred Miersch managed to find one of the electronic instruments believed to have been lost in the storage room of a recording studio at the Funkhaus. The subharchord was developed in the studio for electronic border areas founded by Gerhard Steinke in 1956 and by Ernst Schreiber in the 1960s and built in several variations. It was a parallel development to the modular synthesizers in the USA in the mid-1960s - but it was fundamentally different in terms of technology and sound generation. The subharchord fell “out of favor” due to the general rejection of experimental music by the GDR cultural policy in 1970. That also meant the end of the studio for electronic sound generation that had been located in the Funkhaus since the 1960s . The development was stopped and the instrument was also forgotten. Today the radio house copy is completely renovated and playable in the Technikmuseum Berlin .
architecture
According to the use, the listed part of the radio building was subdivided into four functionally separate building parts, which are connected to each other by bridge-like, column-supported transitions. In the monumental main building with the dominant, nine-storey tower house, numerous offices for the editors and administration as well as recording studios for radio broadcasts were built. The arch-shaped studio building was built according to the house-in-house principle for unique acoustics and includes several recording and radio play studios as well as the large broadcasting hall 1. Ehrlich also built a large multi-purpose building with a canteen and a two-storey event hall as well as a large hall with a shed roof , which enabled optimal illumination with daylight. Together with the factory garden , the ensemble of buildings has been a listed building since the beginning of the 21st century.
The concrete skeleton of the former veneer factory was given a new façade of red brickwork , the Franz Ehrlich by pilasters of sandstone vertically divided. These have no constructive function, but give the building a clear and monumental character, which is given a certain lightness by the elegantly floating roof.
The floor plan and construction of the neighboring studio building, which consists of an outer house and eight inner houses, are unusual. The architect designed a windowless head building, the corner masses of which frame a central building, likewise without a window, which in turn is structured vertically by upstream pilaster strips. Behind it is the Great Recording Room 1, which is known worldwide for its acoustics. The adjoining studios are combined in a quarter-circle arch and equipped with a well thought-out access system. The outer glazed and light-flooded arcade with the large steel windows is a reminiscence of Ehrlich's Bauhaus and served as a foyer and lounge. The smaller, inner archway opened up the technical rooms. The studios themselves have a trapezoidal floor plan and separate foundations to prevent sound transmission, as well as adjoining control rooms and lounges.
Franz Ehrlich already worked closely with radio technician Gerhard Probst in the planning phase . The interior decoration was carried out with significant participation by the renowned Deutsche Werkstätten Hellerau in Dresden . Despite time pressure and limited financial resources, the builders have succeeded in creating an acoustically perfect building that still attracts musicians and orchestras from all over the world to studio recordings on Nalepastraße. The studio building is considered to be the largest contiguous studio complex in the world.
Regardless of the size of the buildings, the architect deliberately avoided representative driveways or entrances to the buildings. This isolation from the environment was a compositional principle and should symbolize the concentration on the work. However, if a visitor enters the building through the partly almost hidden entrances, spacious foyers with open stairs and representative entrance halls with columns open up to them . In the studio building, Franz Ehrlich had the shaft of the columns plastered black and the Echinus , the connection between the column shaft and the ceiling, set off in red. For the floor, he used Saalburg marble , a colored limestone from Thuringia that was popular in the 1930s and partly from the destroyed Reich Chancellery .
Equipment and use
Recording studios
The studio buildings of the Funkhaus Berlin fascinate with sound quality, optimal reverberation time and good studio equipment of the rooms. In the recording studio playing A-ha , Sting and the Black Eyed Peas one of their albums. After the fall of the Wall , Daniel Barenboim and Kent Nagano also recorded symphonies and operas in large recording room 1, and large music labels such as Universal , BMG , Sony , EMI and Teldec regularly use the studios for music productions of all styles. The largest tenant from 1993 to 2007 was the Babelsberg German Film Orchestra . The construction and the acoustically perfect expansion of the studio building by the architect Franz Ehrlich, the chief engineer Gerhard Probst and the acoustician Lothar Keibs are still an engineering masterpiece.
On March 17th, 2017, the Depeche Mode album Spirit was released in the Great Recording Hall.
The entire studio building was built as a house-in-house construction, which means that all studios have separate foundations, were separated from each other by reverberation rooms and expansion joints and completely built over and surrounded so that the recordings are made free of external influences. Wall cladding, ceilings and floor coverings are chosen so that certain frequencies are filtered out or absorbed. In individual studios, the wall design consists of vertically rotating, triangular prisms whose surfaces are covered with different materials that can be selected according to the desired acoustics.
Large reception room
The Great Reception Room 1 in the head building of the arched building is internationally known. Daniel Barenboim had numerous concerts recorded there with the Staatskapelle Berlin and praised the hall for its acoustics: “I consider the hall to be one of the best recording studios in the world [...] It also gives the musicians the opportunity to hear themselves very well and to make the sound correspondingly colorful. "
The large recording room 1 has a trapezoidal area of around 900 m² and has 250 seats and a large concert organ . The organ, built in 1957 by the Sauer company from Frankfurt (Oder) , has 80 registers on four manuals and is in need of renovation. The orchestra sits in a step-shaped depression, the tub , free in the room, which gives a good acoustic impression of the room. Both the plywood ceiling cladding and the half-columns, the stucco elements and the cladding on the walls are used to absorb different frequencies through the use of different materials .
Control rooms
The control rooms , equipped with modern digital and surround sound recording technology, are located on the first floor along the long side of the hall and allow a view of the large recording room through large studio windows. Especially the carried recording high-caliber classical music and great film music productions. Resounding names such as Cecilia Bartoli , Jerry Goldsmith or Roman Polański are proof of the good reception conditions at Funkhaus Berlin.
Block A
A wood-paneled meeting room from the GDR era has been preserved on the fifth floor of this building and was used by the broadcasting committee. This historical room is to be preserved along with the former executive office and the original furnishings such as blue upholstered armchairs , propaganda posters or Honecker pictures and used as a small museum.
owner
From 1993 to June 2006
With the unification agreement in 1990, the five new federal states and the state of Berlin became owners of the entire property. They searched intensively for a new use and a new owner. On November 3, 2005, the Jessen construction machinery company Bau und Praktik GmbH acquired the building and space. Marketing was carried out by the property company of the State of Saxony-Anhalt, Limsa. Berlin was the only state to object to the sale, but could not prevent the deal as its share was only 8.5%. The company paid 350,000 euros for the Spree area, the market value of which was estimated at 30 million euros. On their behalf, Go East Invest SE managed and planned the property. At the public meeting of the economic committee of the Treptow-Köpenick district council on January 11, 2006, Wolf D. Hartmann , board member of Go East Invest SE, presented his plans and visions. But concrete statements about investments and further developments were not known.
The construction and practice GmbH had a majority of tenants on 23 December 2005 Änderungskündigung come. She could not provide the tenants with a power of attorney for this, but these tenants should conclude a new lease that should only include the operating and ancillary costs. The specific amount was not mentioned. It was also unclear whether the (commercial) tenants would also have to bear the vacancy, administration and repair costs. Hartmann was unable to answer all of these questions at the committee meeting on January 11, 2006.
It was also reported that just three weeks after the purchase, Bau und Praktik GmbH was transferring the listed property to a Nalepa Projekt GmbH i. G. resold. The six eastern German states - as sellers - considered withdrawing from the purchase contract. On May 4, 2006, Nalepa Projekt GmbH was entered in the commercial register of the Charlottenburg district court.
On July 15, 2006, the listed part of the site with an area of 4.3 hectares was sold on to a Charlottenburg cosmetic surgeon at an auction for 4.75 million euros . On July 17, 2006, auctioneer Mark Karhausen withdrew the bid because the Charlottenburg doctor was “completely submerged”.
The Berlin tax authorities then checked whether the original sales contract from 2005 could be reversed, since "Business with properties that are sold on for more than 100 percent are considered immoral." In the expert report, however, this was considered difficult. In August 2006, the Ministry of Finance of the State of Saxony-Anhalt , headed by Finance Minister Jens Bullerjahn , dismissed Hans-Erich Gerst, the head of the State Office for Property and Real Estate Management Saxony-Anhalt (LIMSA), without notice and filed a criminal complaint "against unknown persons on suspicion of infidelity and fraud ”. The State Audit Office of Saxony-Anhalt assessed the sale in an audit report as “highly unprofessional, worthy of criticism, imprecise, frivolous”.
Furthermore, Berlin and the new federal states probably had to raise more than 500,000 euros as a result of an operating cost calculation after the sale from tax revenues. The buyer, Bau und Praktik GmbH, had paid for neither electricity nor heating. The company shares were quickly sold on and the company's headquarters were relocated from Jessen to Berlin. The former managing director of Bau und Praktik , Frank Thiele, was accused of fraud and infidelity to the detriment of the new federal states and Berlin. In later court hearings it became clear that the purchase was more likely to involve fraudulent intent. The manager was sentenced to nine months in prison .
From July 2006 to 2014
After the disaster caused by Bau und Praktik GmbH and the reversal of their purchase contract, the previous owners auctioned the property on July 19, 2006 for 3.9 million euros to Keshet Geschäftsführungs GmbH & Co. Rundfunk-Zentrum Berlin KG , at its head Israeli investor stood. The new owner, like the previous owner, was obliged to maintain a "cultural and economic use" on the site.
The Keshet Geschäftsführungs GmbH & Co. KG Broadcasting Center Berlin intended, the building complex conservation practice to get into its substance and combine together by new options past, present and future. The Funkhaus Berlin should largely be retained as a location for the media and business world and become a point of contact for people who deal professionally or privately with media and music and the related branches of industry. First renovations took place and a café ( milk bar ) was reopened in the traditional style in Block C.
Since the winter of 2011/2012, Keshet GmbH & Co. has been leasing the rooms in Block A as studios and studios to mostly young artists from Germany and abroad, including music schools, various companies and recording studios, under the heading of freedom for their ideas (e.g. Audio Sound Arts Studio , Radio Play 2 , Studio P4 and Tricone Studios ). Through the vernissages and events ( salon ) of the Irish gallery owner John Power, who had temporarily set up his gallery G11 there, the artists also increasingly came together to form a community and organized their first own open studios in November 2012 : the studios were open for a weekend open to visitors. There were performances by musicians and performance artists as well as a small cinema, an improvised art market and the large corridors on the third and fourth floors have been redesigned into a painting and photo gallery.
In connection with the event Kunst am Spreeknie in Oberschöneweide, the second Open Studios took place in July 2013 , which already reached a larger public and was visited by numerous residents of the vicinity of the broadcasting house and former employees there. Several bands performed in the event room (since September 2013: Lighthouse ) and there was again a cinema. A video clip illustrated the event. Many of the current and former artists in the Funkhaus are networked with one another. The Open Studios also took place in 2014 .
Interim owner in May 2015
Not all of the plans of Keshet GmbH were implemented in nine years, so that the entire ensemble was again offered for sale worldwide from the end of 2014. In May 2015, the new owner was the company Objekt Funkhaus Berlin Immobilien GmbH, registered in the commercial register on February 10, 2015, with the managing director Timo Scholz.
Since June 2015
A Berlin daily reported in July 2015 that the listed facilities of the Funkhaus Nalepastraße now belong to a consortium led by private entrepreneurs Uwe Fabich and Holger Jakisch , who already own and operate the Postbahnhof , Erdmann-Höfe and the water tower at Ostkreuz . You bought the property for twelve million euros and intend to build “one of the largest music studios in the world” here. The roof of the historic fleet hall was repaired as early as June, and the car workshops located there had to move out. Fabich wants to expand the 4,000 square meter hall into an event location in which concerts, markets or trade fairs can take place. The installation of glass studios is also being considered. The established musicians, photographers, painters, multimedia people, concert organizers, publishers and designers should be able to stay in Block A. Fabich is in negotiations with other tenants such as Native Instruments . In order to make it easier for new tenants to settle, a ship shuttle is to be established from Berlin city center to the broadcasting center. The old cultural hall will be marketed for rock concerts , and art exhibitions will take place in the foyer of Block B.
The original radio studios of the GDR, in Block E – T, are owned by Nalepaland OHG. The latter is planning a campus with a balanced mix of uses of offices, studios, handicrafts, etc.
literature
- Jan Eik : Special incidents. Political affairs and assassinations in the GDR. 2nd, revised and expanded edition. Das Neue Berlin, Berlin 2006, ISBN 3-360-00766-2 (on the 1955 Funkhaus fire).
- Gerhard Steinke, Gisela Herzog: The room is the dress of the music. Music recording rooms and radio play studios in the Funkhaus Berlin-Nalepastraße as well as other performance and listening rooms. Room acoustic properties, recording technology conditions. Copy & print Adlershof, Berlin 2012, ISBN 978-3-9811396-8-6 . ( Book review )
- Matthias Thalheim: Dummy head stereophony and radio play - dramaturgical and staging consequences of dummy head stereophony in radio-dramatic productions of the radio of the GDR , Neopubli, Berlin 2016, ISBN 978-3-7375-9703-6 .
See also
Web links
- Homepage of the Funkhaus Nalepastraße
- Time travel through the Funkhaus in Nalepastraße
- Funkhaus Open Studios 2012–2015
- Entry in the Berlin State Monument List with further information
- Olaf Kriseleit: The production complex . Retrieved on March 11, 2011 (seminar at the Institute for Cultural Studies at the Humboldt University in Berlin ).
- Claudia Fried: So now plasticine men. What followed the GDR radio in Berlin's Nalepastraße . In: Deutschlandradio Kultur , December 9, 2009, report
- Panorama pictures of the radio house Nalepastraße, kubische-panoramen.de
Individual evidence
- ↑ a b c d Karin Schmidl: New pace in the old radio house . In: Berliner Zeitung , July 6, 2015, p. 16.
- ↑ Berliner Zeitung , May 13, 1955, p. 2.
- ↑ Bodo Mrozek: Comrade Techno . In: Der Tagesspiegel , July 24, 2005.
- ↑ Monument complex Nalepastraße 18–50, broadcasting center Nalepastraße, radio house, studio building, outbuilding and factory garden, 1951–1956 by Franz Ehrlich and Gerhard Probst
- ↑ Home. Retrieved March 15, 2017 .
- ↑ VDT Magazin , 2/2003.
- ↑ The auctioneer did not get his money . In: Berliner Zeitung , July 18, 2006.
- ↑ State Audit Office harshly criticizes the million dollar deal . In: The Parliament , No. 38 of September 18, 2006.
- ↑ Two years and nine months imprisonment for fraud in the sale of the property in Nalepastraße in Berlin with the GDR broadcasting buildings , press release PM 45/2011; Retrieved July 6, 2015.
- ↑ New prospect for the radio house . In: Berliner Zeitung , July 19, 2006.
- ^ Gallery G11 (June 6, 2015) .
- ↑ Art at Spreeknie (6 June 2015) .
- ↑ Video clip Open Studios 2013 (June 6, 2015) .
- ↑ Overview of the activities of the artist community: Artfunkhaus .