Petra Kahlfeldt, the new Senate Building Director, is an experienced, debate-proof architect. The office, headed by the 63-year-old and her husband Paul Kahlfeldt, has been firmly established in the Berlin building scene for three decades, i.e. since the days of the Senate Building Director Hans Stimmann. Berlin traditionalists have now glorified it as an era in which investors trembled and strict city aesthetic rules applied.
But now interest rates are zero, the hardware store is so overheated that many projects are being put on hold, and the state’s land reserves have largely been sold or developed. Kahlfeldt therefore lacks Stimmann’s essential pressure elements. Nevertheless, with the hopefully coming wave of construction, it should ensure that the quality of the planning also determines the quantity. It also has to restore Berlin’s power so that the federal government can no longer push through scandalous projects such as the Museum of the 20th Century and the investors who no longer have the most banal building mass designs. And it has to provide fresh air in the architectural debates.
Kahlfeldt belongs to what some benevolently describe as the new Berlin school, others as a closed Berlin system. Many clever ideas of her predecessor Regula Lüscher failed because of this informal coalition of vested rights in all parties, conservative architects, stingy investors and stubborn building authorities. But Berlin must continue to assert itself in the tough competition of cities, must meet its climate obligations, and must take residents and new citizens with it.
Well-to-do bourgeois architectural aesthetics a la Kahlfeldt & Kahlfeldt will not be able to cope with this future. Much more than reform traditionalism is the connection to the long despised West Berlin ecological urban redevelopment and the cautious urban development of the 1980s. So, Ms. Kahlfeldt: When will the green courtyard wall, the wooden structure, the solar roof be transformed from the exception to the Berlin building standard?