Capital building: Anxiety and memory in Berlin's government district

摘要

This dissertation explores the buildings that were constructed in response to the German government's post-reunification relocation from Bonn to Berlin (Norman Foster's renovation of the historical Reichstag building, completed in 1999, Axel Schultes's and Charlotte Frank's Chancellery, completed in 2001, and Stephan Braunfels's Paul-Lobe-Haus and Marie-Elisabeth-Luders-Haus, completed in 2001 and 2003, respectively). These buildings, and the master plan on which they were constructed, show a strong commitment to continuing the rhetoric of architectural and political transparency that had been so potent in Bonn. But whereas Bonn's government architecture, a set of emphatically modernist structures which consistently emphasize the visibility of governance, distances itself from architectural tradition, Berlin's new federal buildings dig deeply into a narrative of architectural history that is specifically German and ideologically rooted in the project of nation-building. The apparent modernism of these structures exists in concert with a Romanticizing tendency that connects the contemporary moment in Germany to the past. This dissertation argues that, rather than positing the post-reunification period as an exceptional moment that cannot be historically contextualized, the buildings of the government district suggest their participation in the great sweep of German architectural history. Particularly important to the design of the government district is the 19th-century neoclassical architect Karl Friedrich Schinkel, who emerges as a surprisingly vital source of inspiration for post-reunification architects working in Berlin. Furthermore, the capital-building projects of Louis I. Kahn (in Dhaka, Bangladesh) and Le Corbusier (in Chandigarh, India) provide fruitful backdrops against which the new government district positions itself.