A walk through Potsdamer Platz: Europe’s biggest construction site 30 years on

The first buildings of Berlin’s born-again Potsdamer Platz opened 30 years ago. Largely complete by 2000, this ambitious urban development, a kilometre south of the Brandenburg Gate, had been Europe’s biggest construction site. How big? One hundred and fifty acres. Think of Potsdamer Platz as more or less the size of 50 Trafalgar Squares or 30 Midtown Manhattan blocks. Half as big again as London’s towering Canary Wharf and almost as big as Beijing’s Forbidden City.

A walk through Potsdamer Platz

How could such a big, jigsaw piece of a major European city have ever gone missing? What happened to the old Potsdamer Platz between its bright-lights 1930s heyday and the 1990s? What is the new Potsdamer Platz like 30 years on? Daniel Libeskind, the architect of Berlin’s radical Jewish Museum, which opened in 2001, said around the time of the development's completion: 'Potsdamer Platz is an example of how you can hire the best architects in the world and still not automatically end up with something great.' Proficient, that is, if a little soulless.

The buildings rising here from the early 1990s on four commercially developed plots were designed by, among others, Renzo Piano, Richard Rogers, Hans Kollhoff, Helmut Jahn, Arata Isozaki and Rafael Moneo, all distinguished architects. The quality of construction is high, with generous use of terracotta, brick and sandstone cladding. The development also features sustainability elements that were ahead of their time, such as green roofs and the recycling of rainwater into urban pools to lower the environmental temperature. The Sony Centre, designed by the Chicago architect Helmut Jahn, has a dramatic, circus-like quality, its eight buildings sharing a dramatic vaulted roof stretched between them. There is public art galore. Frank Stella. Robert Rauschenberg. Jeff Koons.

Here is also Dunkin’ Donuts, Pret a Manger, KFC, the Legoland Discovery Centre and The Upside Down, 'Berlin’s first interactive social media museum'. On any day of the week, tourists parade in their tens of thousands. In other words, Potsdamer Platz is an interesting port of call for daytrippers, students and fans of 1990s commercial architecture and urban planning, and it remains an important site of Berlin's reunification and a powerful place in European history.

It is also an important case study for those keen to understand the effects of the privatisation of public space. At the time of its development, the large-scale scheme was controversial for bringing a commercially led attitude to a historically sensitive and central part of the city. Even with its high footfall, the development can feel detached from the city proper.

It was always going to be a challenge to re-establish what had been a No Man’s Land for many decades. Photographs, films and recollections of Potsdamer Platz between the two world wars reveal how it was once an essential and decidedly lively part of an energetic and cultured city that lost its way, along with its very fabric and thousands of its citizens, as Nazi Germany went to war in 1939.

What had been an 18th-century military parade ground morphed into Berlin’s version of Times Square or Piccadilly Circus, albeit on a much bigger scale, criss-crossed by trams and, below ground, by U-bahn and S-bahn trains, and flanked by grand department stores, Neo-Baroque embassies and government offices, nightclubs, neon lights and a general sense that all modern life was here.

In 1933, as Martin Wagner, the chief city architect, drew up plans to completely reconstruct Potsdamer Platz in a modern style, the Expressionist architect Erich Mendelson completed his ultra-modern, multi-use Columbushaus on one side of the great square. Remarkably, Columbshaus survived the Second World War only to be gutted by fire and then demolished with the coming of the Wall and No Man’s Land on either side.

Since the reunification of Berlin and Germany in 1990, a debate had raged as to how the city should be rebuilt. One solution was Potsdamer Platz, vilified for bringing commercially driven development and privatised public space into the heart of an old European city. Compared, though, to many later such schemes around the world, it can still look remarkably refined and restrained – an outlying, unexpected sample of 1990s architecture.