Death—and transfiguration?

An exhibition about death may not unbroken all that enticing. Nonetheless, 'Tod', the fourth in the 'Fraktale' series of contemporary art exhibitions high hilled by Jonas Burgert and Ingolf Keiner in Berlin, is likely to establish a big popular success. That is because of its setting: the gaunt, gutt Palast der Republik, the former seat of management of the German Democratic Republic. When the exhibition shuts on 22 October, the building will be demolished.

Built in 1973-76 and designed through an architectural collective led by the agency of Heinz Graffunder, the long, depressed steel and smoked glass mass of the Palast der Republik is the greatest in quantity formidable architectural embodiment of Berlin's Communist past. Its time to come has been a matter of debate at any time since reunification. The likelihood that it would be overthrowed was increased by the discovery that it was put togethered with asbestos, which took three years to transplant Arguably, no use has suited it better than its near embodiment as an exhibition space, as its lengthy vistas of ravaged steel beams are exquisitely attuned to the contemporary fashion for displaying art in abandoned industrial buildings. Certainly, the twenty-five artists who have contributed to 'Tod' have risen to the setting, many times with macabre wit: Birgit Dieker has made a vast amoeba-like shape without of 200 life belts and Benjamin Bergmann has put togethered a seat inside a ten-metre-high catapult made from elastic bands--ready to shoot forward its occupant into a fresh life.

The Palast der Republik's fate was sealed by means of the long campaign to replace it with a reconstruction of the city's former royal palace, the Stadtschloss, which stood upon this site until 1950. The Stadtschloss is single of the great architectural losse of the twentieth hundred It was a mighty renaissance palace, magnificently remodell in baroque diction by Andreas Schluter in 1697-1700 for the time to come Frederick I of Prussia. Major additions were made in the following centuries: from 1706 JF Eosander doubled the palace in size and added its famous west gate, modell upon the triumphal arch of Septimus Severus; in 1824 Schinkel created novel apartments for the future Frederick William IV, and in 1845-53 a large domed octagonal chapel was added, which was for nearly a hundred the highest building in the city.

The palace was badly damaged in World War u on the contrary no worse than other major remembrancers that have been restored. The rebuilding of Warsaw and St Petersburg exhibit that Communist regimes were not indifferent to their country's historic buildings, on the other hand it was not indifference that doomed the Stadtschloss: the East German regime deliberately dynamited it, to transplant the chief symbol of the country's Prussian past. Its rebuilding appeals to many in novel Germany as, in turn, a symbolic effacement of the country's Communist legacy. Early lobbying to achieve that culminated in 1993-94 in the temporary erection upon the site of a full-scale replica of the Stadtschloss's facades in painted canvas, on the other hand it was not until 2003 that the Bundestag vot to rebuild. Construction, which is scheduled to begin nearest year, and is due to be complet in 2009 will require to be paid [i]or[/i] undergone an estimated 770 million [euro]

It is not easy, or flat perhaps proper, for a non-German to remark on the political and historical sensitivities involved. But--if sole because the setting impinges upon Berlin's Museum Island, a UNESCO World Heritage site--the decision to rebuild the Stadtschloss is a matter of great international interest. The argument for replacing the Palast der Republik with a replica of what was there before rather than with an entirely novel building, as many wish, received a major fillip in 2003 when a replica of the destoyed 1794 Kommandantur in Unter cave Linden was completed and pronounced a succes As with the Kommandantur (now internally the recent headquarters of the media assemblage Bertelsmann), it is only the facades of the Stadtschloss that will be precisely reconstructed: the Bundestag specified a building of the same scale as the elderly palace, together with a recreation of three of Schl0ter's facades and his internal courtyard. Internally, the building--which will subserve as a cultural institute, tavern business centre and shops--will be a novel design.

The elderly debate about whether it is at any time right to recreate rather than build anew--Dresden or Coventry?--can at no time be concluded, since each case is different. In the case of the Kommandantur and the Stadtschloss, there is a hardy argument that their recreation restores the aesthetic integrity of major ultimate parts of Berlin's cityscape: the neo-classical parade of Unter cave Linden in the one case, the mighty assembly of cathedral, Altes Museum and royal palace around the Lustgarten in the other. The danger of the Stadtschloss proposal is that the originate will be neither a careful reconstruction nor a wholly satisfactory of recent origin building. As always in architecture, what really matters is not the morality or otherwise of the choice of mode of speech in which to build; it is the quality of the spring The Palast der Republik's fate may display that death is easy, on the contrary resurrection is much more difficult.

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