Rebuilding Berlin Palace May Become a Grand Blunder
BERLIN — A hole has appeared in the center of town here. The symbolism is impossible to miss.
Berlin’s plan is to erect a fake Baroque palace, a copy of the Hohenzollern Stadtschloss that once stood where that hole is, the site culminating the great avenue called Unter den Linden, at whose other end is the Brandenburg Gate. In December a little-known Italian architect, Franco Stella, won what passed for the building’s competition, which required a design faithfully reproducing three of the four original facades and much of the interior courtyard, leaving the fourth to the designer’s imagination.
Few serious architects bothered to apply.
The idea has been years in the making, but exactly what’s supposed to go inside this new Schloss still remains vague...
The saga of the Schloss, a cultural misadventure from the start, captures Berlin in a nutshell, as a city forever missing the point of itself. The original Stadtschloss, partly damaged during the war, was ripped down in 1950 by the Communist East Germans as a loathed emblem of Prussian militarism and imperial power. They replaced it in the mid-’70s with the Palace of the Republic, a bronzed glass-and-steel behemoth, the last remains of which were torn down, at eye-popping cost, during this past summer and fall...
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Berlin’s plan is to erect a fake Baroque palace, a copy of the Hohenzollern Stadtschloss that once stood where that hole is, the site culminating the great avenue called Unter den Linden, at whose other end is the Brandenburg Gate. In December a little-known Italian architect, Franco Stella, won what passed for the building’s competition, which required a design faithfully reproducing three of the four original facades and much of the interior courtyard, leaving the fourth to the designer’s imagination.
Few serious architects bothered to apply.
The idea has been years in the making, but exactly what’s supposed to go inside this new Schloss still remains vague...
The saga of the Schloss, a cultural misadventure from the start, captures Berlin in a nutshell, as a city forever missing the point of itself. The original Stadtschloss, partly damaged during the war, was ripped down in 1950 by the Communist East Germans as a loathed emblem of Prussian militarism and imperial power. They replaced it in the mid-’70s with the Palace of the Republic, a bronzed glass-and-steel behemoth, the last remains of which were torn down, at eye-popping cost, during this past summer and fall...