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Solitary buildings in the city fulfil more than one purpose: they are representative,
they can express power, they can be used for identification and orientation
purposes, or they may be an integral component of urban design. Solitary
buildings are symbols that say something about the occupiers. Public buildings
often stand alone. In 1950 Walter Ulbricht, first secretary of the
Socialist Unity Party, planned to create a characteristic image for
East Berlin’s city centre, by means of monumental buildings. There was
to be a large square with a central building on the main thoroughfare from
Stalinallee to the Brandenburg Gate. The idea of a central building, a
"House of the People", originated in the twenties. The competition for
restructuring the centre of East Berlin took place in 1958 and also promoted
the dominant features of urban development. But none of the blueprints
submitted received a majority vote. Instead the proposal by chief architect
Henselmann to build the (urgently needed) television tower in the city
centre was accepted. Visible from afar, it symbolised the progress of the
GDR from 1969 onwards. The idea of a "people’s house"
led - veiled in ideology - to the Palace of the Republic, which added the final touch
to the government forum on Marx-Engels-Platz in 1976. There were already
two solitary buildings there: in the early sixties, the State Council building
had been erected, which was honoured to have the portal of the former Royal
Palace because it was from the palace balcony that Karl Liebknecht had
proclaimed the "Free Socialist Republic" in 1918. It was also where the
GDR Foreign Ministry, completed in 1967 and demolished after reunification,
was located, constructed at an angle to the West and thus forming an architectural
frame for the centre of East Berlin. At the same time as the Philharmonic
in West Berlin, two adjacent buildings, the "Haus des Lehrers" (House of
Teachers) and Congress Hall emerged in the East. Their characteristic forms
point not only to the architectural and technical potential of the GDR,
but can also be seen as the beginning of a change in values: a move away
from the compact, Stalinist city in favour of urban development of the
modern age. The ICC built in West Berlin in the seventies is often
described as a counterpart to the Palace of the Republic. The similarities
are in the size, the state-of-the-art rooms and the combin-ation of culture
and politics in the building in the East and culture and commerce in the
building in the West. In their own architectural language, both buildings
express power, wealth and technical perfection. The Palace of the Republic
now stands for a social system of days gone by.
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