By MICHAEL KIMMELMAN BERLIN

A hole has appeared in the center of town here. The symbolism is impossible to miss. Berlin’s plan is to erect a fake Baroque palace, a copy of the Hohenzollern Stadtschloss that once stood where that hole is, the site culminating the great avenue called Unter den Linden, at whose other end is the Brandenburg Gate. In December a little-known Italian architect, Franco Stella, won what passed for the building’s competition, which required a design faithfully reproducing three of the four original facades and much of the interior courtyard, leaving the fourth to the designer’s imagination. Few serious architects bothered to apply. The idea has been years in the making, but exactly what’s supposed to go inside this new Schloss still remains vague. At the moment the scheme calls for a museum of non-Western art, a library, restaurants and cafes. German officials, often inclined toward euphemism, have christened it the Humboldt Forum, after the philosopher and his naturalist brother. Carson Chan, who runs a gallery here, put it better. A Schloss-shaped mall, he said. The saga of the Schloss, a cultural misadventure from the start, captures Berlin in a nutshell, as a city forever missing the point of itself. The original Stadtschloss, partly damaged during the war, was ripped down in 1950 by the Communist East Germans as a loathed emblem of Prussian militarism and imperial power. They replaced it in the mid-70s with the Palace of the Republic, a bronzed glass-and-steel behemoth, the last remains of which were torn down, at eye-popping cost, during this past summer and fall. The palace housed the East German parliament but also a clutch of restaurants, theaters, art galleries and bowling alleys that provided East Berliners with a measure of escape from the drudgery of Communist life. Even some West Germans developed a little nostalgia for it, as the place before which news reporters in East Berlin were always posing. When it was shuttered after the wall fell (asbestos was the official excuse), artists remade the abandoned space into a hot spot for new art shows and performances. The derelict palace epitomized hipster Berlin, a capital of second chances and opportunistic subcultures. Clubs in former Nazi bunkers, bars in Communist-era high rises, theaters in disused factories, art galleries in empty tenements  like the bygone Palace of the Republic they are what has attracted young people since the wall fell to a city that, historically, has kept failing to become the metropolis it aspired to be, and instead always became something more interesting. It’s hard to find a thinking Berliner these days who actually likes the Schloss idea, the latest in a slew of historical reconstructions across Germany and Central Europe that includes the Alte Kommandantur, a former Baroque palace just next door to the Schloss, and also the Frauenkirche in Dresden and the Stadtschloss in Braunschweig, which has become a mall. Some sites should be reconstructed. Supporters of the new Schloss tend to be West Germans angry at the former East Germany for tearing the old Schloss down, and also cautious Berliners fearful of what happened at places like Potsdamer Platz, not far from the Schlossplatz. Who can blame them? Potsdamer Platz today is a trash bin for big-name modern architects who did some of their worst work there. They were following a lousy master plan. Having come of age during the post-modern 1980s, Berli’s urban bureaucrats envision the city as a kind of hand-me-down Paris,” as Niklas Maak, an architecture critic here, put it on a recent afternoon  a stage-set of an old capital, with phony, manufactured charm, erasing traces of the bad years of the 20th century, with all the dissonance that, to younger Berliners, is a civic virtue. Willed forgetfulness is unforgivable here, of all places. The same cluelessness caused officials last year to mothball Tempelhof, an ingenious work of 30s design, a functioning airport with a soaring, light-filled terminal in the very heart of town, a 15-minute taxi ride from the Brandenburg Gate, where Gary Cooper and Errol Flynn descended into a scrum of flashbulbs on the tarmac  now empty, made useless toward no clear end. The outcome is uncertain at the Schloss too. Its projected cost is $800 million, but no one believes that figure won’t skyrocket. Having pushed the plan, the federal government is stuck with the tab, but, facing the same gloomy financial picture as everyone else, Germany may simply not have the money. A newspaper here this week reported that there may not be enough qualified stonecutters in the whole of Europe to do the job. Here’s hoping that’s true. Did I mention that the original, 18th-century Stadtschloss, by Andreas Schlueter and Johann Friedrich Eosander von the, was a hulking, unlovable pile? Even the emperors didn’t want to live there. Proponents of reconstruction argue a new Schloss would restore an urban complex that includes great buildings by Karl Friedrich Schinkel, Berlin’s most important Neoclassical architect. But this makes less than no sense, not least because Berlin decided during the 19th century to construct an appalling wedding cake of a cathedral next to, and all out of proportion with, Schinkel’s landmark Altes Museum, which is across the street from the Schloss. Sorry, Humboldt Forum. Ingeborg Junge-Reyer, the Berlin senator in charge of urban development, told me the other morning, with a perfectly straight face,  it is decisive that it is called the Humboldt Forum, not the Schloss, because the name Humboldt symbolizes knowledge, openness to other cultures, and to culture, and that fits Germany. Wilhelm von Humboldt, the great philosopher, educator and friend of Goethe and Schiller, and his brother Alexander von Humboldt, the naturalist, like Schinkel evoke the glory days of Berlin’s Enlightenment. Meanwhile a German official advocating the Schloss got in hot water recently by suggesting that the forum would include studios open to the public for artists from Africa, Asia and other exotic places, bringing to mind the old Hottentot and freak show displays. The official later insisted this wasn’t what he meant. Speaking of which, competitors for the Schloss design almost totally ignored the issue of what a museum of non-Western cultures might look like within an imitation of an imperial palace. Quai Branly, the museum Jean Nouvel recently designed in Paris for this same purpose, is in many ways a calamity, but it at least began from the serious premise that devising such a building in a Western capital during the 21st century is a complex issue demanding careful consideration. Arising only as an afterthought, as something to put in the Schloss, the museum here entered almost not at all into the discussion. If the Schloss gets built, it’s a ticking bomb. Mr. Stella, a student of Aldo Rossi, the Italian architect who championed historic renewal, seems giddy with victory and is full of talk now about public piazzas and civic continuity. You wouldn’t build a modern building in San Marco in Venice, he said over coffee the other day. Why should Berlin stick a modern building on this site? I don’t ask myself about political issues, whether the person who built the building was a king, he added. The Schloss was important for the German nation and because Berlin is disjointed, not homogeneous, it’s all the more important to recover its history. Memory is what distinguishes Europe from America. That’s ridiculous, but more to the point few Berliners are still alive who can remember the original Schloss. The Palace of the Republic, by contrast, though generally lamented as an eyesore, and, occupying only the eastern end of the Schlossplatz, badly oriented on the site, did belong to the living memory of many Berliners; and more than a few of them were heartbroken to see it erased. Post-1950s German architecture is undergoing reconsideration, deservedly so. It’s a mystery why thrifty Germans never considered simply inviting architects to reuse the frame while filling out the empty space that the old Schloss once occupied with a larger building. Good designers might have considered it a challenge. Instead competitors for the Schloss had few options. They envisioned walls of Renaissance stonework and glass boxes slid into the ersatz facades like boxes of matches left partly open. Mr. Stella’s design had the distinction of being simple. The single facade left for him to design he imagined as a grid of square loggias, intended to evoke Schinkel’s Altes Museum, recalling Rossi too, and maybe a bit of fascist architecture. It’s ultimately a monument to civic caution and historical ambivalence. The Schloss represents Berlin today, a capital of pipe dreams, and broke; fashionable but provincial, megalomaniacal yet insecure, a Petri dish for youth culture, stodgy and fearful, steeped in history but brand new. The city sprawls across lively neighborhoods riven by expanses of nowhere. Add to that the big hole at the center, on which a pavilion for contemporary art, a kind of oversized trailer, is now temporarily parked on the western corner of the Schlossplatz, like a handkerchief covering a corpse.
The N.Y. Times: January 1, 2009