The main hall at Tempelhof airport. According to the German Finance Ministry, it will cost one million euros per month to maintain the empty building

Berlin’s Nazi-era Tempelhof Airport has been the subject of intense controversy and numerous architectural competitions since its closure at the end of last year.  As the city celebrates 20 years since the fall of the Berlin Wall,  Tim Abrahams explores the airport’s architecture and its potent political significance. All photography by Dan Dubowitz  

On 20 June this year, 5,000 Berliners attempted to gain access to their city’s famous airport, which had been closed in October 2008. Marching under the slogan ‘Squat Tempelhof’, the stated aim of the demonstrators was to turn the Nazi-built airport over to public use. Their attempts appeared to be a failure. The Squat Tempelhof protestors had handed the initiative to the police when they announced their decision to invade the 400ha site in a press conference a month earlier. In addition, the police and Berlin’s mayor, Klaus Wowereit, had been subjected to criticism for allowing Labour Day demonstrations on 1 May to get out of hand. They weren’t going to let that happen again.

On the surface, the inabilitity of Berlin’s famous anarchist/leftist squatter community to invade the vast Tempelhof symbolises the dissipation of their power. In the 1970s, it was a powerful group, particularly in the neighbouring Kreuzberg district. When the Wall came down in 1989, thousands of young people poured into the city from the rest of Germany and into abandoned properties in the former East. Tempelhof was the next step: a building with huge political significance as well as massive potential as a public facility. The unsuccessful campaign to squat the airport was only the most recent in a series of democratic attempts to keep it open. A city-wide referendum narrowly failed to reach the necessary quorum when Wowereit declared that, as the vote wasn’t constitutionally binding, he was going to ignore it anyway.

From the Mayor’s perspective the building is something of a millstone. The terminal is said to be the third largest building in the world, after the Pentagon and the Palace of the Parliament in Bucharest. Yet the field itself, hemmed in by the city, is too small for international jets. In its final years, Tempelhof operated at an annual loss of up to €15m (about £13m). The city has stated that this money is needed for construction of the planned Berlin-Brandenburg International Airport: an expansion of Schönefeld Airport built in the former East. Protestors point out that the listed Tempelhof building will still cost one million euros (£680,000) per month to maintain when mothballed: the more likely reason is, they say, that private partners funding the extended Schönefeld have stipulated there shouldn’t be any competition to the new airport.

Tempelhof’s 85 years of service as an airport ended in October 2008. Its closure creates an unused space three times the size of London’s Regents Park in the centre

Today, Tempelhof is empty, and is likely to remain so. The main building alone is 1.2km long, wrapping halfway around the airfield. It is astonishing that the building, even when empty, is free of the oppressive feeling of fascism. In many ways, it is the ultimate Nazi building that formed part of Hitler’s plans for Germania, a capital of the Third Reich to be built on top of Berlin. The capital was to be built on two axes. The first axis would have run south from a new Great Meeting Hall which would have been built next to the Reichstag and been 10 times larger than St Paul’s in Rome. A boulevard would have connected to a huge railway station, and been punctuated by a massive victory arch marking the junction with an eastwest axis. This boulevard would have led to Tempelhof.

As it is, Tempelhof was the only part of the plan that was built, its hangars and gates arranged in a huge span that forms the wings of the building. In plan, the building is a very Nazi-looking eagle. Flight has only been part of Tempelhof’s purpose. Throughout the 18th and 19th centuries, the site was used for military exercises by the Prussian and German armies, and as a parade ground for infantry and cavalry units. Its aeronautical use came at the beginning of the 20th century. Later, Hitler combined the two roles. The building’s roof is effectively a tribune from which aeronautical displays and great spectacles of marching could be viewed.

It should be a ‘crushing’ experience, as Hitler intended. But it isn’t. This may partly be due to the speed with which it was built, under the direction of Ernst Sagebiel. Ground was broken in 1936 and 18 months later the roofing ceremony was celebrated. When it was finished, the complex included 49 separate buildings, seven hangars and 9,000 offices.

Its lines are simple and relatively unadorned. The narrow windows in the facade are reminiscent of the collonades of Albert Speer’s Zeppelintribune in Nuremberg, but this isn’t architecture as backdrop. It’s pragmatic. Light cascades into the deep plan of the building, and warms the limestone. From inside, one is not aware of its Nazi origins, as the most dramatic aspect is from the first-floor departures lounge, where one could see the aircrafts arriving and departing from the hangars beneath. It is, as Sir Norman Foster has said, ‘the mother of all airports.’

The integrated hangar and terminal building at Tempelhof is 1.2km long. It is supposed to be the third largest building in the world

Berliners think of Tempelhof as somehow salvaged from its origins. At the entrance, near the eagle statues, which have had their swastikas removed, stands a memorial to the Luftbrücke, or Airbridge, which looks like the beginning of a concrete rainbow. From 1948 to 1949, the airport was the means by which the Allies lifted a Soviet seige on the encircled West Berlin. Taking off from Frankfurt and landing at Tempelhof, predominantly US Air Force planes kept the enclave well fed. The locals called these planes ‘Rosinenbomber’ (Candy Bombers), because along with vital goods, they also brought sweets.

Tempelhof was a US base until the 1980s and whole parts of it are still discernible as former US military accommodation. The Airbridge effectively rescued Tempelhof from its Nazi past. Berliners also love the fact that it’s located in the centre of the city and that, despite the grandeur of the building, one could cycle there to catch a flight on a small plane either to the rest of Germany or Austria.

Wowereit has been Berlin’s mayor since 2001. He will be remembered for his short, immediately qualified statements. In 2001, addressing a convention of the Social Democratic Party (SPD), for which he was candidate for the mayoral elections, he announced: ‘ich bin schwul, und das ist auch gut so.’ (‘I am gay, and that’s a good thing.’) Two years later in an interview with the press, he declared ‘Berlin ist arm, aber sexy.’ Berlin is poor but sexy. In some central Berlin districts, unemployment is at 20 per cent. Plus, much of the tax revenue the city does generate goes towards serving its €60bn (about £5.2bn) debt. In an article Der Spiegel published this year titled Can’t Even Afford A Crisis, Michael Burda, an economist at the city’s Humboldt University stated: ‘Because Berlin has done relatively so poorly for the last 40 years, it can’t do much worse.’

The Hall of the Heroes. According to a security guard, this room full of Nazi statuary was stripped bare by US troops in 1945

And yet Mayor Wowereit seemed inclined to pursue a unique strategy, which has evolved out of Berlin’s unique situation. Berliners’ squats have provided a unique economy. Ingeborg Junge-Reyer of the Senate’s Urban Development Department refers to the art galleries, open-air cinemas, ski schools, and the children’s gardens that have emerged across the city as ‘a laboratory for the business of temporary use’. The Senate’s support for these entrepreneurial squatters is pragmatic. According to Overmeyer, ‘there’s a strong policy from the urban development bodies to try to foster parks and promenades and so on, but they always run out of money and they suddenly depend on these users as partners in development and maintaining space. They found that you can create intensive public domains without designing public space. These domains are essential for the public image of the city but also for the social stabilisation of certain neighbourhoods.’

For two and a half years, Overmeyer, together with fellow ex-squatters from the architecture and art practice Raumlabor, and the more conservative architecture practice Michael Braum, developed a proposal of encouraging ‘actors’, individuals from adjacent areas into the space to determine what Tempelhof should be. The combined approach was to think of architecture not as a fetishised object, but as an object with a relationship to its surroundings and to social space. The idea was to think of strategies which worked from the bottom-up and, according to Matthias Rick from Raumlabor, to perform actions ‘where we create a narrative or a fiction which is also a strategy for activating space. What we try to do is find the connection in this tension between urban planning and these action events.’

An aerial photograph of the airport stands in the Hall of the Heroes. In plan, Tempelhof is shaped like an eagle

Two months before the airport was closed, however, the Mayor closed down the research group and mothballed their work. Overmeyer believes this is due to poor communication between the Senate and the Mayor. Benjamin Foerster- Baldenius of Raumlabor thinks it was deliberate disregard on the part of the Mayor. Bizarrely, Wowereit then launched an ideas competition for the site, with three prizes, one of which was won by a team including London-based Chora architects and Gross Max from Scotland. Their project seems to be heavily influenced by the work of the preceding research. ‘At the core of our proposal is a participatory instrument enabling inhabitants and other stakeholders to creatively negotiate a process-based development,’ explains the text on their entry. A familiar concept to anyone who has read Urban Pioneers.

Not much hope is being derived from this latest call for ideas, however. The authorities in Berlin know how to kill ideas with competitions. When the Munich-based practice Hilmer and Sattler won a competiton for the master plan for Potsdamerplatz in 1991, it was subsequently diluted when an alternative, developed for the investors by Richard Rogers, was put before the Senate. Renzo Piano then won a further competition set up by Daimler Benz, which led to the horror show that was eventually built. So Chora’s prize should be taken with a pinch of salt. It is only the first stage in a three-stage competition. And ideas are not what is lacking. An illustration by Raumlabor shows Tempelhof covered with all the ideas for the space that people gave them during their research. There is room enough for all of them.

The building is much loved by Berliners. On the wall at the bottom of these stairs to the main hall is a mural dedicated to the US-led Airbridge campaign of 1948-1949

Wowereit has his own idea, however. He has kicked out the last remaining businesses who were renting commercial space there and handed Tempelhof over to a public-private partnership (PPP) who want to make the old airport a venue for fairs and festivals. The anchor tenant is Bread and Butter – a German fashion fair, which prides itself on its use of historically significant spaces for its catwalk shows and displays. In the past the fair has been held at a cable plant in Berlin, and the halls built for the Expo of 1929 – the Fira Barcelona. The last fair was held on 1 July and was clearly the real prompt to the Squat Tempelhof protestors. The fair will return in January 2010. The Mayor seems determined to build on Berlin’s reputation as a playground. It is ironic that he is closing airports given how vital he clearly thinks weekend trips are to Berlin’s future. It is hard not to visit Tempelhof and think what a great airport it would make.

This vision of Berlin as Europe’s playground will not sustain Tempelhof, let alone the whole city for very long. The squatters may yet have their victory, albeit in a manner which they will not immediately recognise. The sheer scale of Tempelhof, amid the profusion of free and cheap space for development in the city, and combined with the city’s poverty means that sooner or later they will have to open it up to some form of community activity. The high rents paid by organizations like Bread and Butter, will only go some way to offsetting the maintenance costs. When it is eventually opened up, Berlin’s increasingly sophisticated economy of public appropriation and temporary use will begin to work on it for better or worse.