Collective plan

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Greatly simplified representation of the collective plan of the planning collective 1946

The collective plan is next to the Zehlendorfer plan and the Bonatz plan one of the most important overall concepts for the reconstruction of Berlin after the Second World War . From the destruction of the tenement city, politicians and town planners drew the hope of building a “new city”, the basic features of which had been established as a concept since the 1920s.

The planned demolition of buildings , which was to get to 70%, with planning as a car just " urban landscape " and the separation of functions this plan presented in the tradition of the two urban manifestos of modernity the " Plan Voisin " by Le Corbusier for the Paris city ​​center and the 1942 Athens Charter of the Congrès Internationaux d'Architecture Moderne (CIAM).

collective

Hans Scharoun had already been appointed city ​​councilor and head of the building and housing department at the Berlin magistrate in May 1945 by the Soviet city command under Nikolai Erastowitsch Bersarin . A general plan for Greater Berlin was forbidden on the part of the Allies , but Scharoun managed to set up the Main Office for Planning II , headed by Wils Ebert , a close Bauhaus friend of Selman Selmanagić , in order to carry out an overall plan there.

Together with Scharoun, Ebert mainly selected employees for the new planning for Berlin who were characterized by their training at the Bauhaus or the TH-Charlottenburg , who knew each other and who then had professional experience as employees of Eiermann , Gropius , Hilberseimer , Poelzig , Tessenow or the Taut brothers had collected. They formed the “planning collective ” and agreed to joint authorship under this name . The choice of name documented the spirit of optimism at the time and was intended to demonstrate the proximity to the Soviet occupying power. In addition to Scharoun, this collective included:

New planning of Berlin

Based on the extensive destruction of large parts of the tenement city within the Ringbahn and the assumption of extensive public-law disposal over the land, Berlin should be designed as an "organic urban landscape", as a " ribbon city" and thus enable the "city of tomorrow". For Scharoun, the prerequisite for the implementation of this concept of an urban landscape was the “mechanical loosening” of the city due to the Allied air raids on Berlin and the availability of land.

The collective received permission from the city to set the land price at 50  pfennigs per square meter. Although the structure of the city and in particular the supply networks were largely preserved, the planning collective assumed that the city was completely destroyed.

The plan envisaged a fundamental socio-political and urban reorganization, which included a radical restructuring of the entire urban area with the detachment from the historically evolved floor plan of the city. In its place, the rectangular system of expressways planned by Peter Friedrich should take place, which lead through a green urban landscape, and in which evenly distributed strips for living cells according to the model of Siemensstadt for 4,000-5,000 inhabitants, trade and commerce lie. The aim was to loosen up the uneconomical and inhospitable structure of Berlin through an economic "allocation of living and working areas" and to connect its individual areas in such a way that a "new, living order" results.

The topographical features of the landscape of the Urstromtal with Barnim and Teltow , with the Spree and Havel were to be worked out by exposing the buildings and, as important parts of the town plan, to be combined into a consistent recreational system. The planning envisaged a “car-friendly” city with a level-free street network , the intersections of which are designed in the shape of a cloverleaf, like on motorways, to ensure an unhindered flow of traffic .

It was planned to develop the Bandstadt with four parallel traffic routes in east-west and five in north-south direction. This street structure was intended to replace the historical structure that tapered radially towards the Spree ford . A central work area was to extend along a ribbon in the glacial valley of the Spree in an east-west direction, to which residential areas were assigned to the north and south . In this volume, the central institutions of a local (city administration, warehousing, logistics) and supra-regional type (state institutions, trade unions, economy, finance, news), special cultural institutions (universities, academy of sciences, hospitals, museums) and economic institutions (wholesale , Clothing, press, film, design offices) have their place. The working band was to be made accessible by a railway line from Görlitz station in the east to the ring line at Lietzensee in the west.

In the west alone, the Charlottenburg Palace and the Unter den Linden street in the historic city center from Pariser Platz to the Museum Island with Forum Fridericianum and Palace , including a section of Friedrichstrasse , and the ensemble of Gendarmenmarkt should be preserved as cultural heritage . Scharoun was against the demolition of the castle ruins.

Exhibition in the Berlin Palace

“What remained after the bombing raids and the final battle followed a mechanical loosening up, gives us the opportunity to design an urban landscape. The urban landscape is a design principle for the urban planner in order to master the large estates . They make it possible to break down the unmanageable, the lack of scale into manageable and measured parts and to arrange these parts in such a way as forest, meadow, mountain and lake work together in a beautiful landscape. So that the measure corresponds to the meaning and value of the parts, and in such a way that nature and buildings, low and high, narrow and wide become a new living order. "

- Hans Scharoun : Scharoun's opening remarks to the exhibition “Berlin plans” on August 22, 1946

With these words, on August 22, 1946, Hans Scharoun opened the exhibition “Berlin under construction” on the future of the former capital in the poorly repaired White Hall of the ruins of the city ​​palace and presented the construction plan for the eight-person collective as a “collective plan”. The plan had previously been presented to the municipal building trade committee on April 4, 1946.

In addition to the visionary proposal of the planning collective, another design was shown in the exhibition for the construction of the war-torn city, the “Zehlendorfer Plan” developed in the Main Office for Planning I of the Berlin magistrate, which was based on fundamentally different ideas. From today's point of view, it is astonishing that, in view of the hardship of the post-war years, two main planning offices had equal status.

Plans by the architect Max Taut were also shown in the exhibition.

  • Pictures of the exhibition "Berlin under construction"
  • Fotothek df pk 0000 227 004 exhibition stand under the linden trees.jpg
  • Fotothek df pk 0000 227 003 exhibition stand under the linden trees.jpg
  • Fotothek df pk 0000 227 007 exhibition stand unter den Linden.jpg
  • Fotothek df pk 0000 227 009 exhibition stand under the linden trees.jpg
  • Fotothek df pk 0000 227 015 exhibition stand under the linden trees.jpg

reception

The exhibition of the collective plan led to political and technical debates, whereby the topic of "tradition versus modernity" was not discussed yet, but rather the East-West contrast. There was also criticism from urban planners. The long-time SPD member and later successor to Scharoun Karl Bonatz , criticized the plan because it "neglected the political, economic, practical and technical circumstances too much". He criticized the idea of ​​the urban landscape, the rectangular system of expressways, the disregard for the cultural and material value of the preserved roads including their technical infrastructure and the dissolution of the big city into small residential areas. The landscape architects Reinhold Lingner, employees in the planning collective, and Georg Béla Pniower argued over the idea of ​​the urban landscape. Pniower recognized in terms such as "glacial valley" and "down-to-earthness" a continuity to views from the National Socialist era.

However, the plan failed mainly because he considered the preserved underground infrastructure , such as irrigation and drainage, the entire tram and underground network and the existing road network to be outdated and worthless. In view of the immense destruction of Berlin, a completely new building was not feasible for financial reasons alone and in view of the prevailing housing shortage. It was therefore rejected as utopian by the magistrate in April 1946.

Zehlendorfer Plan

At the same time as the collective plan, the “Zehlendorfer Plan” was created in the Main Office for Planning I by the architects Walter Moest and Willi Goergens. They received the order from the mayor of Zehlendorf, Werner Wittgenstein , to "rebuild a planning office and to secure all the material that was still available as a basis for drawing up a plan for the redesign of Berlin and to make suggestions for the redesign of Berlin".

The plans differed considerably from those of the planning collective, as they were based on the existing infrastructure and aimed at new traffic planning .

Both plans sparked heated disputes. Since Zehlendorf was in the American sector , it cannot be ruled out that the Americans did not want to leave the reconstruction planning of Berlin to Soviet supervision. Ultimately, the Zehlendorfer Plan was accepted by the Magistrate's Building Management Committee and the collective plan was rejected as utopian.

On October 20, 1946, the election for the city council of Greater Berlin 1946 took place, from which the SPD emerged as the clear winner. The successor to the non-party Scharoun was now long-time SPD member Karl Bonatz , who was a critic of the collective plan. Accordingly, he favored the Zehlendorfer Plan and returned "to the ground of reality". Bonatz assumed "that we are not dealing with the construction of a new city, but only with the very limited possible remodeling of an only partially destroyed, existing one". In 1947, plans A and B were created as an alternative to a final plan, on the basis of which the city planning office had designs for the inner city developed by Walter Moest and Richard Ermisch .

Bonatz plan

With the elections to the city council in October 1946, long-time SPD member Karl Bonatz was appointed as the successor to Hans Scharoun. Bonatz had previously criticized the collective plan. Corresponding to this rejection, he tended to Zehlendorf planning, where he only criticized the structuring of the urban area, which was limited to green planning: “It is now a matter of promoting the penetration of both principles, that is, the road layout as possible to adapt to the old existing network to combine structural improvements and modern location planning ". Bonatz had assumed "that we are not dealing with the new construction of a city, but only with the very limited possible remodeling of an existing one that has only been partially destroyed".

His design, presented in 1948, was based on the assumption that Berlin, with a population of 3–3.5 million, would become the capital of Germany again. In contrast to the collective plan, Bonatz attached great importance to the old city center, calling it “the most important central part of the city”. A division into “neighborhoods” with 4,000–5,000 inhabitants each was suggested for the residential areas.

With the beginning of the split in the city administrations, neither the collective plan nor the Bonatz plan were implemented.

literature

  • Bodenschatz , Düwel , Gutschow , Stimmann : Berlin and its buildings . Ed .: Architects and Engineers Association of Berlin. DOM A , Berlin 2009, ISBN 978-3-938666-42-5 .
  • Leonie Glabau, Peter Lang: Places in a divided country . City square designs in the Federal Republic of Germany and the German Democratic Republic from 1945 to 1990. Peter Lang, Frankfurt am Main 2010, ISBN 978-3-631-61202-6 ( limited preview in Google book search).
  • Elke Sohn: On the concept of nature in urban concepts . based on the contributions by Hans Bernhard Reichow, Walter Schwangenscheidt and Hans Scharoun on reconstruction after 1945. In: Klaus-Jürgen Scherer, Adalbert Schlag, Burkard Thiele (eds.): Series of scholarship holders of the Friedrich Ebert Foundation . tape 30 . Lit Verlag, Hamburg 2008, ISBN 978-3-8258-9748-2 ( limited preview in Google book search).

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Azemina break Selmanagic contributions to the reconstruction of Berlin
  2. ↑ Elke Sohn: On the concept of nature in urban concepts . based on the contributions by Hans Bernhard Reichow, Walter Schwangenscheidt and Hans Scharoun on reconstruction after 1945. In: Klaus-Jürgen Scherer, Adalbert Schlag, Burkard Thiele (eds.): Series of scholarship holders of the Friedrich Ebert Foundation . tape 30 . Lit Verlag, Hamburg 2008, ISBN 978-3-8258-9748-2 ( limited preview in Google book search).
  3. ↑ Leonie Glabau, Peter Lang: seats in a divided country . City square designs in the Federal Republic of Germany and the German Democratic Republic from 1945 to 1990. Peter Lang, Frankfurt am Main 2010, ISBN 978-3-631-61202-6 , p. 156–157 ( limited preview in Google Book search).
  4. ^ Haufe From planning utopias to built reality: Housing and urban development in the post-war period
  5. ↑ Bodenschatz , Düwel , Gutschow , Stimmann : Berlin and his buildings . Ed .: Architects and Engineers Association of Berlin. DOM A , Berlin 2009, ISBN 978-3-938666-42-5 , pp. 130 .