Fun Palace Berlin 200X

The Palast der Republik is a building with a torn soul – a romanticized ruin of the regime it used to represent and, at the same time, an empty vessel with the potential to represent something radically new. Opened in 1976, in the heart of historic Berlin, the palace was the seat of the East German parliament and a multi-purpose ‘palace of the people’, featuring a conference centre, disco and performance space. Shut in 1990 after it was found to be contaminated with asbestos, it is now a stubborn but striking relic stripped to its steel skeleton, bearing a fractured glass façade covered in graffiti. While many regard the Palast as a derelict vestige of an outmoded political system, the building continues to live and breathe with pride, its gold windows still seeming to reflect a sunset that is no longer there.
Ever since it closed, the Palast has been the subject of a heated argument between those who want to preserve it as an arts venue and the politicians campaigning to demolish it and reconstruct in its place the Prussian castle that once stood on the site. Recently a programme of cultural events called ‘Volkspalast’ transformed the empty structure into a cinema, dance hall and even a flooded cardboard city, proving its promising adaptability.
The cornerstone of the programme was ‘Fun Palace Berlin 200X’, a conference that brought together 21 architects and theorists to discuss alternative uses for the Palast. The starting-point for the discussion of the building’s potential as a centre for cultural innovation was Cedric Price’s Fun Palace (1961), the British architect’s revolutionary, unrealized proposal for a ‘pleasure laboratory’. But this may have been a misleading precedent; while Price’s Fun Palace was designed as a deconstructionist ‘anti-building’ (it had no floor, windows, roof or doors), the Palast is a built structure and, more importantly, one whose interior is still haunted by its former ideology. Price’s idealistic, neutral ‘non-building’ is no counterpart to the fully loaded symbol of former power that now sits in the centre of Berlin. The only thing the two have in common is the potential provided by their emptiness.
The conference’s participants agreed that rebuilding an old castle is an absurdly retrospective idea – but no one could quite put their finger on why. No one wanted to continue the entropic erasure that has allowed the erection of the soulless Sony Centre at Potsdamer Platz, or the gaudy Chancellor’s office, both of which bear their fervent denial of the past on their façades. But equally no one could make a compelling argument for the Palast’s inherent architectural or historical value, to justify the urgent need for its preservation. It was even more difficult to defend the need for a ‘cultural laboratory’. As Mark Wigley rightly asked: ‘Is the state willing to accept culture as an experiment?’ The conference avoided the inevitably dull conclusion: for the state to accept it, such an experiment would have to be turned into a politically and economically feasible proposal, rather than a revolutionary one.
Assuming that the Palast could be transformed into a laboratory for cultural innovation, it faces the same paradox that paralysed Price: how do you encourage participation without seeming to impose it? Price’s meticulous planning and compulsive self-critique kept him from realizing his vision, a dilemma that Rem Koolhaas described as ‘the paradox of the authoritarian insistence on liberation’. The same problem plagues the Palast. Somehow the new programme must avoid the false assumption that confined Price’s experiment to mere diagrams or that left the former East German parliament in ruins – the idea that architecture can facilitate popular participation or play a role in promoting public happiness.