Dur­ing last year’s Not­ting Hill Car­ni­val we passed a pecu­liar build­ing in the dis­trict of North Kens­ing­ton: a con­crete tower block, 31 grey storeys stacked up into London’s sum­mer sky. The sight dazzled us, since this dis­mal monu­ment rose eer­ily and high above the cheer­ful crowd of musi­cians, dan­cers and the like. As I learned months later, the build­ing I since then both admired and detested, was the fam­ous Trel­lick Tower, a para­mount example of bru­tal­ist archi­tec­ture.

Back in Ber­lin, my com­mute led me through parts of Steglitz and some sim­il­arly strange build­ings that were clearly built in the same time. My route ended in a Lichter­felde side road, flanked by two massive con­crete blocks which sat heav­ily on the ground. The one to the left had only few and nar­row win­dows that breached through the grey facade of béton brut. A long ramp lead to the main door, sep­ar­at­ing the struc­ture from the ground like it was ready to take off. The build­ing to the right had the skewed exter­ior walls of a con­crete prism, that acid rain had blackened over time. Strange vent­il­a­tion pipes crushed through the hull. Its win­dows were of an uncom­mon tri­an­gu­lar shape that bulged from the cor­pus, all facing to the front of the pecu­liar structure.

These build­ings looked like space­ships. Not the styl­ish ones from sev­eral sci-fi movies, more like the rough ver­sion as in Battle­ship Galactica. Con­crete space­ships, built for yearn­ing soci­ety that watched the first man walk­ing on the moon and felt the future would be near. These two par­tic­u­lar build­ings, facil­it­ies of med­ical research and micro­bi­o­lo­gical labor­at­or­ies, were designed in respect of their func­tion and received an appear­ance that expressed their super­ior claim of sci­entific excel­lence by aes­thetic means of the Six­ties and Seventies.

But the story could’ve been told dif­fer­ently: By the time the dev­ast­a­tions had to be replaced, mod­ern West Ger­man archi­tects had to decide to recon­struct older build­ings or opt for a con­tem­por­ary archi­tec­ture style that star­ted to develop in pre-war times and now flour­ished in other coun­tries. Dif­fer­ent approaches were seen across the coun­try. Per­haps, after 1957’s fam­ous Inter­bau came up with impress­ive build­ings in Berlin’s Hansavier­tel, the gen­eral agenda was set: Mod­ern archi­tec­ture, pre­pared for cur­rent and future demands in infra­struc­ture and dwell­ing, was on the rise. Func­tional, low-cost struc­tures with an out­stand­ing aes­thetic affirm­a­tion of the mod­ern soci­ety were in favour. Concrete was dis­covered for its eco­nomic and con­veni­ent qual­it­ies in ver­sat­ile con­struct­ing. Soon, the most excit­ing ideas were advanced and even­tu­ally put into action.

How­ever, this isol­ated island of the West­ern world amidst East­ern ter­rit­ory was always sub­ject to pro­pa­gand­istic interests. In Ber­lin, The West was on pub­lic dis­play. Affected by this, West-Berlin archi­tec­ture had to reflect con­tem­por­ary styles. Soon, key build­ings were con­struc­ted to exem­plify the West­ern power to serve for super­ior solu­tions to cur­rent demands. Schöneberg’s Pal­las­seum intro­duced new dimen­sions of indus­tri­al­ized build­ing. Hos­pital Steglitz (now Char­ité Cam­pus Ben­jamin Frank­lin) uni­fied all med­ical fields in a single cen­ter of max­imal care. Kreuzberg’s St. Agnes church approached a mod­ern form of sac­ral build­ing. Not to for­get the “Bier­pin­sel”, as we call it: a land­mark of invent­ive and play­ful archi­tec­ture on Schloßstraße, built for a simple func­tion such as a res­taur­ant. Even the former East­ern part of Ber­lin had its bru­tal­ist build­ings: The embassy of Czech Repub­lic is a fine and bold example of suc­cess­ful adapt­a­tion of a West­ern archi­tec­ture style.

But as years went by the prom­ises of these build­ings faded. Aes­thetic demands changed, soon these build­ings from bru­tal­ist times were con­sidered to be hideous, clumsy, by no means appro­pri­ate and up-to-date. The con­crete seems to have turned even more grey or brown­ish and the notion of being futur­istic is com­pletely gone. Pal­las­seum developed into a socially deprived hot spot; the beloved Bier­pin­sel stood empty and was recently painted over by some urban art act­iv­ists and St. Agnes church waits for refur­bish­ment to become Johann König’s new gal­lery. As time goes by, these once fine examples of bru­tal­ist archi­tec­ture are at risk to fall into obli­vion. How­ever, they still make an impact on unsus­pect­ing ped­es­tri­ans as they eer­ily rise from the ground they heav­ily sit on. I for one, am glad that some of these build­ings have been reserved and am eager to dis­cover more of them.