Gabion: Berlin Builds: Inside the Reichstag and other stories 1/3

Eagle at Tempelhof Airport (architect Ernst Sagebiel, 1936-9)

Published in The Sunday Times, 31st January 1999, as "The British way to give Berlin a lift": Photos copyright Hugh Pearman unless otherwise stated

Despite the evidence of wild creativity offered by the 1930s novels of Christopher Isherwood, the 1970s musical collaborations of Lou Reed, David Bowie and Brian Eno, the 1980s films of Wim Wenders, the present-day radical architecture of Daniel Libeskind, and the low-life paintings of scores of 20th century artists, Berlin is, physically, a curiously strait-laced city. It is Prussian, after all. This may explain why, when it comes to building in the once and future German capital, the British feel almost at home: they have to struggle with a very inflexible system that is deeply suspicious of innovation. What's new?

So compromise is inevitable, but not necessarily fatal. In the old centre of West Berlin near the Zoological gardens, Nicholas Grimshaw has finally completed his extraordinary steel-hooped Berlin stock exchange/chamber of commerce building, Ludwig Erhard Haus - better known as "the Armadillo". Though it has ended up a little tamer than he wanted, it is still deeply unorthodox by Berlin standards.

Nicholas Grimshaw: Ludwig Erhard Haus
Photo: Werner Huthmacher

At the other end of the Tiergarten - Berlin's central park - Sir Norman Foster is completing work on the celebrated Reichstag, its new glass dome containing double-spiral public viewing ramps and a great mirrored lightscoop to the parliamentary chamber beneath. Again, this is less than the much more extreme design which Foster first entered for the competition - but like Grimshaw, Foster has weathered some storms to get his design built, and emerged with credit.

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