Berlin Brandenburg Airport: chronicle of a disaster

Everyone knows that Berlin's airport took years too long to build. But did you know why the plan went so badly wrong?

If you live in Berlin, you might not know the name Meinhard von Gerkan, but you are sure to know his work.

The flamboyant architect was still in his 30s when he designed Tegel Airport, whose departure halls are still beloved for their convenience. Since reunification, he’s built the airy new Hauptbahnhof and Jakob-Kaiser-Haus, the administrative building next to the Reichstag, as well as renovated the Olympic Stadium.

It’s no exaggeration to say that von Gerkan is unrivalled for his impact on the cityscape of the reunified Berlin.

But there is another project that he surely would rather forget. For all his achievements, von Gerkan will always be associated with three words to send a chill down the spine of city planners the world over: Berlin Brandenburg Airport (BER).

Back in the 1990s the reinstated capital decided it needed a modern airport befitting its status. Its three Cold War airports were too small, too central, too old fashioned.

Von Gerkan won the design competition for the new airhub.

His drawings were elegant in their simplicity. A single glass terminal would be covered by a flat roof spanning from parking bay to piers “in one gesture.” Suspended on columns, the roof was a homage to Mies van de Rohe’s “schwebende Dach” at the Neue Nationalgalerie.

What a roof it was to be. Clean and pristine. Free from clutter like chimneys or air vents.

Achieving this goal wasn’t without complications, though. A building used by millions of people every year has requirements beyond the aesthetic. Fire safety, for instance. Getting around these problems wouldn’t be cheap.

But what’s money in the face of a work of art that would impress visitors for decades to come?

“Simple truth doesn’t get you anywhere in my profession,” von Gerkan candidly told der Spiegel in 2013. “The Opera house in Sydney would have never been built if people had known all along what it would cost. One has to fake the numbers.”

For a city as broke as Berlin at the turn of the century, “faking the numbers” meant presenting the public with a plan for a smaller, more humble building than that which would eventually emerge.

As one opposition politician wryly observed, “the ink was barely dry on the planning certificate before a wave of changes were implemented.” 

A whole new floor was added in order to increase capacity. Berlin’s mayor, Klaus Wowereit, insisted on a docking bay for the enormous Airbus A380, even though German’s third largest airport wasn’t supposed to host the doubledecker jet.

Not all of the changes were to von Gerkan’s taste. Seeking to increase revenues to pay back its onerous debts, the city extended the shopping area to 2,000 square metres.

“Airports have been degraded into enormous shopping malls,” the architect would later comment.

Throughout it all though, von Gerkan got to keep his pristine roof. The price to be paid was a highly complex fire safety system, which would not channel smoke in the direction it prefers to go - up. Rising smoke, after all, would have required (ugly) chimneys.

Powerful extraction fans were instead installed that would suck the smoke under the building before channeling it away through underground pipes. Ensuring that the suction was strong enough - but not too strong - was a delicate balancing act. Thousands of flaps inside the pipes were to open and close in response to hundreds of different fire scenarios - all of it controlled by sophisticated software. If a flap closed at the wrong time, the resultant pressure could collapse a pipe.

While the system was functional in theory, no one knew if it would work in practice.