Exberliner Issue 167, January 2018

REGULARS
Save Berlin
By Dan Borden
Polar express
At Hauptbahnhof, train travellers get a chilly reception
– and it’s about to get colder. Dan Borden explains.
Forget Potsdamer Platz or the Reichstag
dome – Berlin’s most ambitious
piece of post-Wall architecture is
its main train station, aka Hauptbahnhof.
German rail company Deutsche Bahn took
a billion-euro gamble when they proposed
the city’s first central station, binding
together tracks from east, west, north and
south. The station opened in May 2006
but it’s far from complete: Deutsche Bahn
is still digging away, expanding its network
of tunnels. The 300,000 passengers who
flow through Hauptbahnhof every day
confirm Berliners’ commitment to lowcarbon
transport and the station as the
city’s beating transit heart.
In 1993, Hamburg-based architects Gerkan,
Marg & Partners won the design competition
for the station, Europe’s largest.
Their scheme was inspired by the Eurostar
terminal at London’s Waterloo station
with its sleek, snake-like glass barrel vault.
Budget cuts famously chopped the east end
off Hauptbahnhof’s curving glass canopy.
Trapped beneath its black office towers, our
shortened station is less an elegant snake
and more a handcuffed caterpillar.
Still, Hauptbahnhof is an efficient
machine channelling passengers between
Deutsche Bahn trains and local transit with
a little shopping along the way. Just don’t
walk out of the building. The area surrounding
Berlin’s main train station is a bleak
wasteland – and it’s about to get worse.
Around the globe, travellers stepping out of
central stations are greeted by grand squares
offering hotels and cafes with clearly marked
taxi and bus stands. Hauptbahnhof’s north
portal dumps new arrivals onto a cramped,
chaotic limbo – grandly titled Europaplatz
– where they drag their luggage uphill while
dodging taxis in the shadow of a giant, robotic
rocking horse. It’s as if the designers never
meant for their building to touch the ground.
Right across Invalidenstraße from the
station is a vast stretch of abandoned railyards
that’s slowly being transformed into
Europacity, 40 hectares of new offices and
flats. It’s a blank slate, a place where planners
could have acknowledged the station’s
importance by creating the grand central
square that Berlin deserves. Instead, plans
call for a half-hearted extension of Europaplatz
on a triangular patch of leftover space,
bordered by a tunnel entrance on one side
and office buildings on the other. No welcoming
piazza. No sidewalk cafés.
The design bears the stamp of Regula
Lüscher, Berlin’s Senate Building Director.
She describes herself as Europacity’s “design
curator”, and the buildings she’s handselected,
like the planned 84m-high tower
on Europaplatz by architect Allmann Sattler
Wappner, have gridded stone facades reflecting
her penchant for corporate minimalism.
Instead of the lively, decadent Berlin of lore,
Hauptbahnhof arrivals will step out into this
new district defined by Swiss-born Lüscher’s
good taste: uniform, rigid and coldly sterile.
Hauptbahnhof does in fact have a large public
square, though you probably haven’t seen it
unless you arrived by boat. Dubbed Washingtonplatz,
it’s a windswept terrace stretching
from the south entrance to the Spree River.
Half the plaza is currently walled off as
construction workers prepare for the arrival
of Cube Berlin, a building by Copenhagenbased
designers 3XN (photo). If the idea of
this 72m-tall block of ice landing in the heart
of the city provokes dread, you might be
3XN
Hauptbahnhof’s north
portal dumps new
arrivals onto a chaotic
limbo – grandly titled
Europaplatz – where they
drag their luggage uphill
while dodging taxis.
a Star Trek fan: the evil Borg species travels
in cube-shaped starships. The facade’s
fractured-glass motif is equally troubling,
referencing either the shattered windows of
perception or a dropped smartphone screen.
But even more disturbing is what’s inside
this Cube: office space geared toward the
city’s growing army of high-tech drones.
There was a time when Berlin seduced
the world’s youth to come and squander
their best years in a smokey, drunken haze.
Now Europe’s young arrive at Berlin’s
Hauptbahnhof eager to spend long days
at computers in climate-controlled boxes,
devoting their best years to speeding the
wheels of mass consumption. Is it too late
to save Berlin’s cold, cold heart? n
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EXBERLINER 167