This is a city that has been devastated by bombs, by a wall, and by modern architects who dropped faceless buildings on windswept plazas. So when the Berlin Wall came down 11 years ago and the door opened to building on the no-man’s land around it, there was every reason to fear that Berlin would take another pounding -and that a historic opportunity to knit together its long-divided east and west sides would be lost.
But after Wednesday’s opening of the $1 billion Sony Center, a triangle-shaped wedge of offices, rental apartments, condominiums and entertainment attractions designed by Chicago architect Helmut Jahn, it is clear that the scars created by World War II and the Cold War are being healed. It is also clear that modern architecture has matured -and so has Jahn, 15 years after his glitzy, ill-functioning James R. Thompson Center made its disastrous debut.
With an umbrella-like roof sheltering a towering central space, the Sony Center bears an unmistakable resemblance to the Thompson building, still reviled for the way its pink and blue walls intrude upon the classical dignity of Chicago’s City Hall. But the two differ in critical ways, none more significant than Jahn’s move from his flashy postmodern period to a self-assured modernism characterized by exquisitely transparent walls of glass.
While the Sony Center is not a design triumph on the order of Frank Gehry’s stunningly sculptural Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain, it is no less miraculous in the way it restores life to a once-moribund area. Here, on a chunk of land where just 10 years ago there was nothing but empty space and buildings pockmarked with shrapnel, a city is being reborn -one that is a real place, not just a tourist quarter. Achieving this sense of place is no small thing, considering that this is a Berlin building designed by a Chicago-based architect for a corporation that makes its home in Tokyo.
The rebirth is apparent not only in the Sony Center, where the big, internalized public space brings a taste of dizzying American atriums to the Continent, but also in the neighboring Daimler-Benz district, where the architectRenzo Piano has laid out buildings and plazas in a more traditional European manner. Cafes are crowded. Sidewalks teem with skateboarders, dog walkers and parents pushing baby strollers. What had been the gloomy eastern edge of allied Berlin, back in the days when the wall loomed menacingly nearby, is increasingly the city’s vital center.
There are other reasons to pay heed to the Sony Center. It aspires to elevate the low art of entertainment design to the same pedestal occupied by buildings devoted to the visual arts and classical music. It is an example of environmentally-conscious “green architecture,” that allows office workers and apartment dwellers to open windows and breathe fresh air. Most of all, it sends powerful messages about the changing face of Germany’s capital.
Built on Potsdamer Platz, a once-thriving square that was destroyed by Allied bombs during World War II, Sony Center consists of seven buildings, all 10 or 12 stories tall, with the exception of a 26-story office tower. The lower-rise structures include three office buildings, one of which houses Sony’s European headquarters; a condominium building whose public areas feature restored rooms from a grand hotel once frequented by royalty; an apartment building; and a film center that will house the Marlene Dietrich archives.
Following design guidelines established by Berlin planners, these buildings ring the perimeter of Sony’s triangular plot. In contrast to the old modernist formula of isolating towers on a plaza, their outer walls fulfill architecture’s traditional role of creating room-like spaces along the sidewalks of a city. But Jahn, a native of Nuremberg, has never been one to recreate the past and Sony proves no exception.
In the middle of the triangle, framed by the ring buildings’ inner walls, is an oval-shaped public space called the Forum that is longer than a football field and nearly as wide. Reached by gateway-like openings that lead in from the sidewalks, it is topped by a massive roof of glass, fabric and steel that is put together like a bicycle wheel. Restaurants and an IMAX theater line the oval; beneath it, below a curving reflecting pool, are eight movie theaters with more than 2,000 seats. A skylight in the theaters’ lobby puts on a show of its own, allowing moviegoers to look upward through the pool to the Forum’s spectacular roof.
A visitor from Chicago might be tempted to call this space Thompson Center II, but in reality, the Forum is quite different from its American predecessor. It has a much broader mix of uses; they should keep it hopping around the clock. It is, moreover, partly exposed to the elements rather than hermetically sealed; fresh air flows in through a 30-foot opening at the top of the roof and through the hollows in a curving beam that helps hold the roof up. As a result, the Forum has a distinctly ambiguous identity — one feels inside and outside at the same time.
This ambiguity permeates the entire Sony Center and holds the key to how Jahn’s modernism differs from that of the legendary Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. Whereas Mies’ steel and glass cages were “skin and bones” buildings that strove to reveal their internal structure, this new approach seeks a highly transparent skin and nearly invisible bones. It has been facilitated by advances in technology that make glass clearer, and freer of supporting walls, than ever before. At the Sony Center, this approach has yielded some supremely elegant architecture, like that of the 26-story office building, where Jahn wraps a curving wall around the front of the tower, then slices the wall’s outer edge on a dramatic diagonal. The building seems to float, making for a spirited counterpoint to a far more solid-looking, brick-covered tower across the street at Daimler-Benz. Together the two mark an impressive gateway to the new Potsdamer Street, much as Tribune Tower and the Wrigley Buiding create a powerful portal to North Michigan Avenue.
Though only 10 stories tall, Sony’s headquarters is equally impressive. Set on the corner of the site that fronts the sprawling park called the Tiergarten, the building has a so-called “double-wall,” one of the most striking innovations of green architecture. In general, double walls are comprised by an inner wall with office windows that open and an outer wall with slits that admit fresh air. The approach has practical benefits, saving energy and improving worker comfort, yet in Jahn’s hands it is raised to the level of art, with a diagonally canted inner wall resembling a diamond within a polished case.
Here is the same layering of glass upon glass that makes the office tower such a wonder. The old Jahn — dubbed Baron von High Tech for his showy displays of technology — was incapable of such subtlety. Yet Baron von High Tech hasn’t entirely disappeared, as the Sony Center’s gigantic fabric and glass roof makes clear.
Jahn meant the big umbrella to strike up a dialogue with the sloping, hill-like roofs of the Kulturforum, a performing arts center designed by the German architect Hans Sharoun that sits just north of Sony Center. Mostly, as Jahn has written, he wanted Sony to be a new kind of kulturforum, one where pop culture and entertainment challenged the fine arts of classical music, theater and painting.”
Few aims are more urgent, as anyone who has seen the tacky frog-topped roof of the Rainforest Cafe in Chicago’s River North entertainment district knows. But Jahn doesn’t quite carry it off with the Forum’s roof, which, in contrast to Sharoun’s organic forms, sits awkwardly atop the rest of Sony’s buildings, as if Jahn had set down one of those broad-brimmed black hats he wears. Berliners are fond of sticking buildings with deflating nicknames; it is not inconceivable, given the opening in the Forum’s roof and its translucency, that Jahn’s grand gesture could someday be ridiculed as “the Lampshade.”
What saves the Forum is the way it is is connected to the city around it, thus distinguishing it from physically isolated, theme-park environments like Chicago’s Navy Pier. Some critics here have charged that the Sony Center is as internalized as an American shopping center — that it has replaced the Berlin Wall with the Berlin mall — but this perspective does not hold up to reality.
The Sony Center’s gateways invite those on foot to venture in. Better yet, some of the gateways are located right at the end of streets at neighboring Daimler-Benz; still others frame views of handsome structures like the Daimler-Benz office building by Madrid architect Jose Rafael Moneo. “It’s good not to look at another Helmut Jahn building,” cracks Jahn with no small ego as he tours with a knot of journalists around the site.
The inside of the Forum further tears down the “Berlin mall” idea. Whereas the typical mall is sealed off from the outside, Jahn’s Forum extends the modernist ideal of continuity between interior and exterior to new levels. The glass in the roof is so clear that it’s nearly impossible to tell that it’s there; in the winter, after a snowfall, one can see snowflakes resting on the glass without sensing what’s holding them up. The transparency not only creates fantastic patterns of light and shadow, but also sends the message that on this urban stage set, it’s okay to behave as though you’re outside.
There’s more that makes the Forum a town square under glass. Pathways through it are squeezed tightly by the restaurant tables and railings around them; that’s a plus because crowding — not overcrowding, but the kind of density that makes elbows rub — is essential to good city streets. The parade of humanity — and the people watching — should get even better as Sony’s office and residential buildings fill up and increase the project’s density.
To be sure, there are weaknesses. This is more about spectacle than schmoozing. The best public spaces give the visitor a range of scales, both grand and intimate, that this one lacks. Nevertheless, the Forum’s connections with the city and the seemingly chaotic urban pulse within it distinguish it from isolated, overly ordered urban theme parks.
One of the Sony Center’s strengths is that it offers linkages in time as well as space. The lower-floor public spaces of the condominium building contain restored rooms of a grand hotel, the Esplanade, that once occupied the site and was a hub of Berlin’s social life. These neo-baroque rooms once hosted Kaiser Wilhelm II and film stars such as Charlie Chaplin. Jahn has appropriately displayed some of the rooms in glass boxes that resemble museum display cases.
At the same time, a portion of the Esplanade’s war-scarred exterior will appear behind one of Jahn’s trademark glass facades. An elaborate, bridge-like structure has been built over the hotel. The bridge is both literal and metaphorical. Luxury housing hangs down from it, leaving the hotel’s fragile structure undisturbed. At the same time, the bridge symbolizes how the Esplanade is itself a link back to Berlin’s storied past. If the bridge seems overbearing, the gesture to the old that it makes is still welcome in a development that seems rushing to embrace the new.
The end result is that Sony Center’s instant city does not feel like it was created overnight. There is just enough memory, just enough architectural variety and more than enough spatial excitement and people-friendly activity to make this place seem real. It still feels like a European city, not a piece of Manhattan or the Loop transported across the Atlantic.
Certainly, Jahn was aided by the fact that the more traditional Daimler development was across the street, letting him use its walls of brick and terra cotta as a foil for his glassy walls. But his sophisticated artistry and sure-handed urban planning have gone a long way toward making the project work — and setting new standards for entertainment architecture.
More important, he has created a sense of place, one fraught with meaning. Rising from the site of the former wall, the Daimler and Sony buildings symbolize the triumph of capitalism — but in a way that is inviting not vainglorious. “Come and have fun,” the Sony Center says to those on the east and west sides of Berlin. Jahn has helped give this city a thriving new center where once there was only a forlorn edge.
