It is summer, and to sit on such an evening on the square of a large city, a square one has personally created, under one’s own high colonnades, is a rare pleasure. Its architect, Hans Kollhoff, has strolled over from his office near Kurfürstendamm to order his favorite pasta – the one with asparagus – at the Italian restaurant, and to watch from the colonnades the hustle and bustle of the residents and their children, who hang out here until into the night. Just checking to see how his piazza is doing. He pushed it through in years of struggle against the Greens, who wanted everything here to be green, what else.
Kollhoff is one of the architects who have shaped the new Berlin. In the quarrel over what it should look like, he holds a firm position: the city of houses; the stone house in the stone city – as an address among addresses. Not a bunch of colorful, unrelated works of art by egomaniacal architects. It is a plea for a dress code. Essentially a moral position, for the aesthetic rule makes society possible in the first place.
If you wanted to imagine his ideal city figuratively, it would be a society in suits and evening gowns, and anyone who wanted to set himself apart would do so by wearing especially well-fitting clothes. Not, for example, by piercing and tattooing himself. His symbol of Berlin is the exceedingly elegant, dark red building on Potsdamer Platz – the brick-Gothic antithesis to the glassy Sony high-rise that faces it.
And then Hans Kollhoff responds to the question of whether he sees a chance for Berlin:
“Yes. Las Vegas.”
Berlin, he feels, is most likely to have a chance if it becomes like the gambling city in Nevada. “It lies in the pampa like Las Vegas in the desert. This artificial thing has to be supported.”
But is the complete artificiality of Las Vegas not the exact opposite of a conservative idea like that of a city of stone?
“What people have lamented for a hundred years,” says Kollhoff, “that Berlin lacks the substance of London, is its very advantage. Educational laboratory and entertainment spot, there’s something tremendously contemporary about this combination. Creativity plus cheap rents. I spend a lot of time in Italy. The Italians are totally crazy about Berlin.”
For him, the priorities are obvious: “Expand festivals. An opera festival, why not? Don’t close any opera house; that’s the trump card we hold. And strengthen the casino – put a really big one in Berlin. I know, there’s a federalism problem when I say this; Baden-Baden will be up in arms.” But the capital was eviscerated after the war. “The federalist success of the Federal Republic came at the expense of Berlin.” Government, banks, industry – everything fled westwards. Bonn, Frankfurt, Munich, and Stuttgart divided up the skin of the Berlin bear and thus laid the foundation for new wealth.
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