Berlin II: Karl Marx Allee

[Hipster Duck]

Now that I have a flickr account, I will be adding more photos from my Berlin trip from way back when.

Another side trip I made was to walk the length of Karl Marx Allee (nee: Stalinallee). This was East Germany's showcase social realsim boulevard right after the war. Parts of it are looking a little haggard, but the commies intended for the stuff to last.

While architecturally noteworthy, it's not exactly an urbanist's dream. The sheer width and highway nature of the boulevard kind of made it a drag to walk down. The only food I found along the way was a German fast food restaurant serving "Currywurst". The Karl Marx bookstore does make an appearance in "The Lives of Others", but it's one of the few notable shops along the length of the boulevard. It reminds me of a walk down the Grand Concourse in the Bronx, if any of you have ever had that experience.

Anyway, we start off at Alexanderplatz, the former centre of East Berlin.

although well patronized, the sterility of this square is hard to match

at the eastern end of the square it's hard to believe that this is in Germany.

There is a labyrinthian underground pedestrian concourse that is hardly used and badly neglected leading from Alexanderplatz to the Karl Marx Allee

I emerged to be confronted by this Nicolae Caucescu landscape

I really liked this one. It reminds me of that school in NYCC up on Spring Garden road.

A lot of the light posts have been hacked off and replaced with cheap, off-the-shelf models

I'll leave you off at the twin 'gatetowers' at Frankfurter Tor.

 

[Zephyr]

There you have it. Documented in selective places over two threads, Nazi and Communist architecture is often among the least inspiring in the world.

Thanks again for sharing your pictures Hipster.

.​

 

[Hipster Duck]

There you have it. Documented in selective places over two threads, Nazi and Communist architecture is often among the least inspiring in the world.

Thanks again for sharing your pictures Hipster.

.​

There's something ominous about your italicization of my forum name.

Coming up next, a photothread about Giuseppi Terragni's Casa del Fascio. A modernist jewel from Mussolini-era Italy!

 

[Roy G Biv]

Thanks for the pics. It seems like only yesterday I was strolling 'round Alexanderplatz.

It's a shame they're tearing down that old GDR building on Unter Den Linden.

 

[Zephyr]

There's something ominous about your italicization of my forum name.

I guess you caught me. But nothing negative meant by that humour.

 

[JasonParis]

Thanks for the pics. It seems like only yesterday I was strolling 'round Alexanderplatz. It's a shame they're tearing down that old GDR building on Unter Den Linden.

Is it not gone already?

 

[Roy G Biv]

Is it not gone already?

Probably. I'm guessing the old castle is starting to go up.

Talk about deleting history!

 

[allabootmatt]

I understand Karl-Marx Allee is becoming/has become quite hip, no?

 

[Long Island Mike]

Good Berlin,Germany pics!

HD: Good pics of Berlin-I am guessing they were taken in what was East Berlin am I right? Pic#5 with all the graffiti in the passageway looks like NYC to me...hard to believe it's Germany! LI MIKE

 

[junctionist]

Probably. I'm guessing the old castle is starting to go up.

Talk about deleting history!

Demolition was delayed due to the discovery of more asbestos, so the shell is still there. And yes, we're talking about the serious loss of a heritage building. It was a parliament, but this parliament also had restaurants and a bowling alley. We complain about our loss of buildings, but this is rather incomparable, and for what? To replicate a castle.

Maybe Zephyr is right that communist architecture is uninspiring, but communism was supposed to be about modernity. So if we can find and appreciate originality and creativity in the Brutalism, van der Rohe Modernism or the International Style that is so common in Toronto, it's hard for me to say that for the most part communist architecture is uninspiring or depressing. Communist architecture in Central and Eastern Europe isn't that much different what was being built in the 1960s around the world. Nonetheless there are poor buildings you can find like the infamously generic apartment buildings, but we're hardly immune to that with our suburban apartment buildings. Ours admittedly had elevators.

 

[Urban Shocker]

They may have been Commies, but they sure knew how to do a Doric column correctly - which is more than can be said for our slapdash Cheddingtonistas.

 

[simply Dan]

I understand Karl-Marx Allee is becoming/has become quite hip, no?

The buildings that have been completely restored and modernized are very expensive to rent or buy, but the ones that haven't been touched in the past two decades can still be a relative bargain to live in. Karl-Marx Allee really is a must-see in Berlin, architecture enthusiast or not.

 

[Urban Shocker]

There was a project drawing for Terragni's Casa del Fascio in the Italian Arts and Design exhibition at the ROM last year - it reminded me of buildings in some of Georgio de Chirico's dream landscape paintings from 20 years earlier. Mies tried to keep the Bauhaus going in Germany for a number of years after Hitler came to power. I suppose it isn't impossible to do creative work under a dictatorship, for a time at least.

 

[adma]

There you have it. Documented in selective places over two threads, Nazi and Communist architecture is often among the least inspiring in the world.

Actually, taken in the right frame of mind, I find it anything but uninspiring, i.e. I share some of that subversively funky next-generational fascination with the spindly universe of the Plattenbau and the Ampelmannchen. And even the Stalinist stuff makes me feel like its 1986 again when everything on the unfashionable opposite side of the Modernist narrative begged fresh rediscovery (remember: that was long before Pomo-retro became ingrained as hack populist dogma). There's something just so cracked out wired and transfixing about Communist Europe, almost in spite of itself, and even through its shabbiness/datedness/whatever...

I adore the ghost of a sign on the left.

And in case some of you don't know, while it seems to fit in with the Stalinist/post-Stalinist parti, this is actually prewar Peter Behrens. (No, dumbkopf, not the communications mast.)

 

[junctionist]

I have mixed thoughts on Stalin's socialist realism though, which was conceived as creative propaganda through the arts and architecture.