THE HISTORY OF THE PROJECT

Friedrichstadtpassage is a site situated in the very middle of the City of Berlin and one of the most famous urban quarters downtown. It is part of the Fried-richstraße, which was first constructed in the beginning of the 18th century by King Friedrich II of Prussia. It is a road 3.3 kilometres in length originally dead-straight betweentwo town gates right through the centre of Berlin. In the 19th century, it connected the quarters where the government buildings were with those of the shopping and business centres, the headquarters of the newspapers, the theatres, and last, but not least, the amusement area. So it was a magnet for all who possessed or sought money, as well as an arena of continuous construction and re-construction. This part of the Friedrichstraße is geographically located right in the centre of Berlin (Bezirk Mitte). It is marked at the one side by the famous boulevard Unter den Linden, at the other side by the Leipziger Straße, which leads di-rectly to the Brandenburger Tor, and at the third side by the Gendarmen-markt, which - bordered by the buildings of the Academy of Sciences, the Staatstheater, and the Französischer Dom and the Deutscher Dom - is still reckoned to be one of the places with the most urban quality in Germany. Here can be found what literally is called "The Heart" of Berlin and first of the state of Prussia, later of the Deutsches Reich. And it is here where the site of Friedrichstadtpassage is situated. On February 3rd 1945, the area around Friedrichstadtpassage was heavily da-maged by air strikes. The frontier between the two parts of Berlin and later, more severely, the wall, turned that part of the Friedrichstraße into a border area, after the division of the city into West and East Berlin. It was cut not only by checkpoints like the well-known Checkpoint Charlie (less than one kilometre from Friedrichstadtpassage), but cut off from rebuilding and further development on both sides of the fron-tier. In the Sixties, plans to rebuild this area according to the ideas of urban renewal of those days had arisen and been abandoned again - to the advantage of the quarter, because it was planned to widen the traditionally narrow Friedrichstraße into a boulevard of 60 meters. So it was not until the middle of the Seventies, when the government of the GDR had become self-conscious enough to include this area in their plans to built up the eastern part of Berlin as their capital, that redevelopment started. They launched "competitions of ideas" for archi-tects to rebuild this area, and execution began some ten years later. In 1984 the GDR-government announced a big reconstruction and re-valuation of the quarter as a central shopping area, so that Friedrichstraße would become "the most attractive shopping area of our capital". The planning of 3000 dwellings, 45 shops, 22 restaurants, two schools, three Kindergärten, and a hotel as well as the reconstruction of the famous buildings of Gendarmenmarkt (Neues Deutschland 8/2/85), obviously was timed to be ready before important political events like the celebration of 40 years of GDR in 1989, and the X. Congress of the ruling communist party, the Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands (SED) in 1990. Works started in 1987 and construction workers from all over the GDR were concentrated in Berlin and in the Friedrichstraße to meet these goals (Bauwelt 1991 Heft 18/19 p 972-7; Foyer 1991 Dezember p18-20). On the site of what is now 205, 206 and 207 Friedrichstadtpassage, a department store was planned, and the client was the central trade organisation of GDR (Centrum Warenhausgesell-schaft). Galeries Lafeyette, the French department store group, were involved at this stage as a potential user of the new building. Construction works started and were half ready, when, about three years later, after unification, this organisation was taken over by the Treuhand, a state agency founded in the last days of the GDR and later on taken over by the unified state to privatise former GDR state property ("Volkseigentum"). So the Centrum Warenhausgesellschaft from 1990 on was no longer an independent actor. Applicants to buy Centrum Warenhausgesellschaft could not be found. It went into liquidation the same year and the construction works could not be continued (Interview 12/12/1994; Sturm auf die Stadtmitte Der Spiegel 13/8/90). Until unification, the site had been developed by the Baudirektion of the GDR. This had been an organisation of the GDR government, employing, among others, the best architects of the country, which had to undertake all important urban planning and representative buildings, especially in Berlin as their capital. It was among their responsibilities to develop sites and they continu-ed to do so after the end of communist government between 19th March 1990 (first and only free elections in the GDR and formal end of communist partici-pation in GDR government) and 2nd October 1990 (the evening before unifi-cation), still using the land which had been in their area of responsibility. The difference was, that in the meantime, employees of the Baudirektion - according to a resolution of the last SED-dominated government of the GDR before 19th March 1990 - had founded a private real estate company. This company now made a claim for sites totalling 200.000 sqm (including Friedrich-stadtpassage) which had been Volkseigentum or (property of the state) all the time with an estimated value of about 1bn DM. The new company claimed the right to sell these sites to its own profit to developers, who in that days came into East-Berlin in droves. This action of former Baudirektion employees would not only have enabled a company, whose members were thought to be to a great extent former high-rank officials of the former ruling communist party, to become private owner of former state-owned land by a stroke of a pen. It would also have lead to a situation, where this company would have got the exclusive right on the most famous and precious sites in the centre of Berlin or at least would be able to earn a fortune by selling them. So the Senat of Berlin, after October 3rd 1990 responsible for the entire city, acted successfully against the new establ-ished Baudirektion company, and reserved to itself the exclusive right to sell the sites. Without these sites the Baudirektion company owned nothing any- more and went bankrupt. The land, like all former Volkseigentum, was taken into the responsibility of the Treuhand, who then would sell it to later investors (Dreister Griff in die Staftkasse Die Tageszeitung 11/9/1990) . For the Senat of Berlin now the way was open to redefine and reorganise the development of Friedrichstadtpassage according to the new needs of the new capital, which is expected to become very soon an agglomeration of some five million inhabitants. The existing half-completed building was demolished at the site prepared for tender to international developers at the expense of the Treuhand.