Those who entered Berlin in the West after 1979 passed a building that felt like an alien entity wedged between a stark, mid-1930s exhibition centre, a motorway, and a turn-of-the-century neighbourhood. The unusual structure was squat and elongated, with spiral staircases protruding like insect legs from its exoskeleton; it seemed frozen in a mechanical forward motion. Still there to this day, the ICC is one of Berlin’s great sleeping giants: a building once constructed with a single function in mind, like decommissioned airports or an animal testing facility; and it is now waiting for its new purpose.
The ICC (Internationales Congress Centrum), designed by the couple Ralf Schüler and Ursulina Schüler-Witte, was conceived to serve conferences. It features two large auditoriums, seating five and two thousand bodies respectively, and about eighty smaller spaces, restaurants and a roof garden, at a scale that rivalled East Berlin’s multifunctional Palast der Republik or Paris’s Centre Pompidou.
Explore the soon-to-be-transformed ICC Berlin
At the time of its completion, locals called it a spaceship, with its visible structure and multi-level exterior staircases. Clad in metal, futuristic in appearance, it looked like a machine in a landscape shaped by automobile traffic. It is almost inaccessible to pedestrians, wrote architecture critic Julius Posener in 1979: ‘People have to sneak into this menacing building,’ he lamented. It is awkwardly placed, isolated from the city, like a self-contained, self-propelled engine for economic growth. Accessing it from the underground taxi deck, people would be guided through areas, seemingly processed as if on an assembly line, from reception to auditorium, from restaurant to toilet.
The ICC’s carapace was intended to shield it from noise and vibration, making the metal cladding functional and not just an aesthetic nod to the space age. However, the comparison with the Centre Pompidou does it no favours, because the Paris building - said Posener in 1979 - is embedded in a city and in a network of streets at a pedestrian scale. It does a much better job at inviting visitors in.
The whole building with its elaborate ventilation system - conference attendees apparently smoked profusely at its time of completion - needed to be rebooted like an old desktop computer if it wasn’t in permanent use. It rarely operated at full capacity and was deemed inefficient and too expensive. So, since 2014, the ICC has been out of use. It took five years, until 2019, for the structure to be listed as a historical monument. Little happened there, save for a large-scale art show during the COVID pandemic.
In 2022, an initiative led by local PR specialists and architects pushed the gargantuan building back into the public eye by suggesting it be open 24/7 and available for cultural use. In the autumn of 2024, actors across the political spectrum initiated a competition for ideas and designs. Given the pace of redevelopment elsewhere in Berlin - Tegel or Tempelhof airports, for example - a decade between closure and project initiative seems relatively short.
On a sweltering day in late June, not far from the ICC, the news was unveiled that a partnership of nine architecture studios and engineering firms was taking on the project. They have two and a half years to enable the redevelopment. ‘The aim,’ says Björn Werner, architect at Max Dudler, one of the nine partners, ‘is to breathe life back into the building.’
First, what’s needed is a viable concept. Graft and Max Dudler, two of the partnering firms, envision multiple uses. Bike paths will connect the site to the neighbourhood; there will be more green. The site should cease to be a blind spot that is scorching hot in the summer and devastatingly grey in winter. The partnership proposes to add two high-rises opposite the ICC's northern and southern facades to connect them to the complex, creating plazas and opening up the currently closed-off structure.
The aim is to draw on the ICC’s existing formal language but make it sleeker. For the inside, the partners are thinking about different formats. Concerts, for example; the Berlin Philharmonic could use the venue. Or, after some adjustments, the auditoriums could house table tennis tournaments or boxing matches.
One of them might turn into an exhibition space, and the unused rooms spread throughout the building could become artists’ or recording studios. The ideas are many; little is settled. ’The formal language of the building gives us a lot of orientation: the way the car park extends under the structure, which seems to prop itself up via the staircases; the materiality, the rounded corners, variability of the facade, horizontality, layering, the transitions of the body to its exterior,’ says Graft’s Thomas Willemeit.
Flexibility is one of the words Willemeit and Björn Werner use a lot when talking about their project on this summer day in the Graft office on a street corner in Berlin-Mitte: ‘To grant the ground floor expression is essential.’ These are problems that Posener outlined at the close of the 1970s show; the then-architecture tackled other problems than what is required for present day operations. The past era's promises of an automobile-centric city have not been fulfilled. On the contrary, they turned into an urban nightmare. In the 2020s neighbourhoods and urbanity are more connected, fewer cars are used and pedestrian lifestyles are prefered.
‘In Berlin, we have been led to believe that large-scale projects - like the transformation of the two airports - proceed very slowly,’ explains Willemeit. ‘We need unconventional partnerships to find commercially viable solutions, and we shouldn’t wait for a single international player to give us one.’
Another idea is for the new ICC to be open to all, without a ticket, staying accessible late into the night. A possible model for that is Oodi, Helsinki’s central library, which provides space to make music, play video games, and study. Public space, such as that of a library with a multitude of uses, is vital for an open society. Werner adds: ‘We can turn this symbol of failure and stasis into a symbol. It is possible when municipality, investors, and cultural politics get together.’
When asked why they took on such a volatile project, Willemeit muses on the decade before the fall of the Berlin Wall, when East and West experienced tech-fuelled optimism. ‘This building, spaceship on the outside, plush on the inside, embodies this hope for the future.’ He adds: ‘As architects, we have a great affinity to positive visions of the future.’
