BERLIN (dpa) – After the remarkable reconstruction of Berlin’s Potsdamer Platz, investors in the German capital are now preparing to stud the city’s skyline with ten 150-metre-high skyscrapers on the “Alex” – Berlin’s bustling Alexanderplatz square.
City officials say the skyscrapers will transform the square, which back in the 1930s was immortalised in Alfred Doeblin’s novel “Berlin – Alexanderplatz.”Architecturally the towering new structures, costing billions of dollars, will also represent a dramatic change for Berlin, which has long been renowned for its strict rules governing the heights of new buildings.City planners have been arguing for years about what should be done with the Alexanderplatz, which in the early part of the 20th Century rapidly became a busy trade and commercial centre, but later suffered severe damage in war-time allied air attacks.Now, finally, plans for the square’s redevelopment have been agreed, claims Peter Strieder, Berlin’s minister for city development, who notes that architects and city planners linked to the project moved into a “co-ordination” office at Alexanderplatz 5 opposite the lofty “Forum” hotel recently.The job of constructing the ten skyscrapers must begin by 2006 at the latest and be completed by 2015, says Strieder, who appeals to investors to make “an early start on their projects”.Among several American developers whose names have been linked to the huge Berlin project is the New York multi-millionaire Donald Trump.The tower project represents cataclysmic change in architectural terms for the “Alex” but will be in line with an overall concept for the square conceived by Hans Kollhoff, the prominent German architect.Kollhoff is responsible for the bold new Chancellory building, near the Reichstag, which is due to become Gerhard Schroeder’s new workplace when completed this spring.Detleff Steffens, the boss of the Kaufhof department store on Alexanderplatz, says work on its new tower project will begin in the autumn of 2002.“The present building will be revamped and incorporated within much larger premises, crowned with a glass-designed office tower,” and linked via a glass shopping passage to new German Interhotel Holding premises.During reconstruction the store, which employs 900 workers, will remain open for customers.Peter Strieder says private investors have announced they will spend up to 14 billion marks (6.8 billion dollars) on the series of skyscrapers, with a further 150 million dollars being allocated for realignment of streets and overhead railway track.Additional money will go towards the building of two underground pedestrian tunnels.Each of the planned 45-storey-high skyscrapers will emerge from ten-storey-high graduation bases, says Strieder, “unlike the skyscrapers in Frankfurt which are more individual”.In earlier times the square was called Ochsenplatz, later Georgenplatz. Then in 1805 it was renamed Alexanderplatz after a visit by Czar Alexander I to Berlin.In the mid-1960s, the communist Eeast Berlin regime reconstructed the ailing square, equipping it with new pre-fabicated apartment buildings, a soaring hotel complex and supermarkets.Its steepling TV tower on its southern side became a landmark in the 1970s, but by the time the Berlin Wall fell in late 1989, the square had little to commend it anymore. Its drab architecture had become a dismal reminder of the failed socialist experiment.
