Below is my translation – with footnotes to explain important points that non-Germans won’t know about – of a hilariously and brutally dismissive article from May 2019 about a luxury condo building in Berlin by the star architect Daniel Libeskind, from the Süddeutsche Zeitung, Germany’s leading liberal-center-left newspaper (out of Munich; the only national newspaper based in Berlin is conservative, which is a good example of how Berlin’s progressive reputation is nowadays mostly a myth, which is one of the main points of the article, but we’re getting ahead of ourselves). The back story is that Berlin is undergoing gentrification at a hyperspeed the likes of which has never happened in the U.S., not even in San Francisco or New York, and that German people, and architects everywhere, generally agree Berlin has the worst modern architecture of any major European city. I added footnotes for clarification.
“Berlin 2019”
Translucence – and raw pork for breakfast: A Libeskind penthouse in Mitte is for sale. A visit explains a lot about the current state of affairs in the capital
What was that Klaus Wowereit said about Berlin? Poor but sexy?(1) Now, centuries later, when you stand on the roof terrace of the Sapphire – which naturally is pronounced in English, like everything in Berlin that’s meant to not sound like Berlin and ends up sounding more like pickled eggs(2) than a precious stone – it fully sinks in how the expression belongs to a truly bygone era.
The Sapphire is the “first (and perhaps last) apartment that the star architect Daniel Libeskind (3) has built in the capital.” So it says in the press release that announced, with a really tremendous flood of superlatives, that the “Sapphire Super Penthouse” is for super sale. Once past the initial shock – “perhaps last”? Is Libeskind not feeling well? – you learn this is about the last unsold unit in Libeskind’s building.(4) All the others are taken; the building at 43 Chaussee Street in the Mitte district was finished in 2017. The reason a 3,300 square foot penthouse is still available is that the developer wanted it for himself but then changed his mind.
Perhaps after looking out the window.
Across from the Sapphire is the new headquarters of the BND, the German equivalent of the FBI.(5) It is the ugliest, most desolate building in the history of the world, which is quite an accomplishment given Berlin’s many truly tremendously ugly buildings. It cost more than $1.15 billion and no one knows why. But at least that does distinguish it from the rest of the omnipresent New Berlin Fort Architecture with its slit windows like for shooting arrows out of castles, which makes every new building look like a refrigerator with a portcullis. You get chills just walking by the BND. What must it be like for someone who has to look at it from their living room on a daily basis?
Though you have to admit, the man who bought the other penthouse in the Sapphire, some CEO or other, has worse luck. He has a head-on view of this city-planning suicide, even from his bedroom. The better that he’s virtually never there, using the penthouse just as a pied-à-terre, as the friendly man explains whose card says “Real Estate Advisory Director” in English and who shows you around.
So someone with $4.5 million to spend can make themselves at home in a real Libeskind. Or as at home as 23-foot ceilings allow. You can fit everything to your wishes, wood floors, wood paneling, whirlpool. There are two terraces, open and roofed, concierge, blackout curtains, two parking places for those Ferraris with their covers permanently on, two safes, a gym, “high-end bathroom fittings”, and once you figure out how to work the remote, the front door opens by itself. All that in, as the press release proclaims, this “architectonic precious stone with a design that enchants the world over with its transparency and opacity, softness and hardness, and most of all courage.”
If desired, an adjacent small apartment can be annexed to gain an extra room. But its floor plan makes just about every conceivable use impossible. The passage to the bathroom is so narrow it would be easy to get stuck and for that matter there’s a constant fear everywhere of bumping into things and getting injured. Everything here has acute angled corners. It’s not a place for children, who could fall off the gallery if they haven’t already slipped through the open staircase. But the annexation isn’t mandatory.
By the way, it’s intentional that the Sapphire’s stairwell looks and smells like the basement in any cheap lowest-common-denominator building. It’s meant to look raw, unplastered, rough [the article has ‘rough’ in English], like Berlin as it used to be back when there were people under 40 in Mitte.(6)
You can catch a whiff of the old days when you step out the door onto Chaussee Street, where cyclists still feel mortal terror, because the street itself hasn’t yet been ‘gentrified’ for their use, which was, shall we say, not anticipated. There are tram tracks, weatherbeaten and dangerous to cyclists, which the city at some point installed but never put into use and there are no plans to do so.
That, at least, is authentically Berlin.
From the outside, the Sapphire doesn’t shimmer and sparkle as one would expect of something named after a jewel and as the buzzword “transparency” suggests. The facade consists of ceramic panels, allegedly the only of their kind of the world, that apparently clean themselves, or the air, or both, and look like metal, and like an ideal material for use in public transit: graffiti-resistant, dark grey. If one didn’t know which jewel one was supposed to be looking at, one might think the Sapphire was just yet another new dark grey building in Mitte but with a little more zigzagging around the top. But to say something positive: the dog pee spots are much more obvious on the conventional stone building next door.
More good news: the residents don’t have to go far for their grocery shopping. There’s an Edeka on the ground floor.(7) To ameliorate this state of affairs, the store is called Edeka-Sapphire and offers an Edeka lounge with free wi-fi along the pork tartare with raw onions (30% off; a traditional German breakfast food) and organic sauerkraut (but with the French name choucroute).
Daniel Libeskind, who you can say in good conscience doesn’t shy away from sharp angles and the color silver, lets it be known – again to quote the lovely press release – “that he was happy to have had the opportunity to design dozens of museums around the world. But for him the biggest challenge is designing spaces for people to live in.” That’s good news, because Berlin needs 100,000 apartments right now, due to its extreme housing crisis. Most of all affordable ones, although the Real Estate Advisory Director in fact finds $4.5 million too cheap. In any other city it would have long been sold. Only in Berlin is everyone this skeptical.
Life is tough.
So much the better that anyone can live in the Sapphire – apartments on the lower levels are offered by rental agencies such as Airbnb and booking.com. So everyone can get a little corner of a Daniel Libeskind. A chance that, for example, “Jürgen”, a tax advisor from Düsseldorf, took advantage of.
In October 2017 Jürgen left the following, completely lunatic review on Airbnb: “The apartment is really nice, at least for those who like Bauhaus architecture.”
- Wowereit was mayor of Berlin 2001-2014 during the collapse of its economy, state-owned central bank, legal, educational, and health care systems and quality of life from which it has still not recovered, making Berlin a sort of anti-Germany and the Germans’ own least-liked city, according to national surveys. His spontaneous remark in an interview in 2003 that Berlin is “poor but sexy” instantly exploded into one of the most powerful marketing slogans in world history, capturing Berliners’ perverse pride in the city’s dysfunction and status as Europe’s undisputed capital of trashy, sidewalk-urinating collegiate party tourism (not unlike Fort Lauderdale before the 1990s when the city kicked it out the drunk students and reinvented itself into a pleasant, thriving, slightly upscale gay/lesbian travel destination.) Sixteen years later the slogan’s potency is undimmed even though the ‘sexy’ is mostly gone, as this article points out.
- A scornful pun, because the English word sapphire sounds a lot like the German word Senf-Eier (zenf-ire; it really does sound like sapphire), pickled eggs, a snack that conjures up images of bars characterized by small-minded intolerance and frequent fights; see: Poor but Sexy.
- Known for the superb Jewish Museum (2001) and the master plan – not the design of actual buildings, only the general layout – of the World Trade Center reconstruction
- The confusion is due to the fact that German uses the same word to mean an apartment building and a single apartment in an apartment building, and so the press release’s slipshod phrasing seemed to be saying that Libeskind will never design another apartment building in Berlin.
- BND, Bundesnachrichtendienst (“state information service”) which, creepily, literally means news service or press office.
- This is one of the article’s most scathing indictments. Mitte is the most gentrified district of a city that has seen gentrification at a scale and speed unmatched even by New York or San Francisco, in that it only first began about seven years ago but has since swallowed most of central Berlin and caused the world’s fastest-rising rents, whereas gentrification in the U.S. has mostly proceeded much more slowly.
- Supermarket chain, which like all markets in Berlin corresponds to the low end of American supermarkets, the kind where most of the produce is wrapped in plastic. Foreigners hoping for anything more are in for a disappointment, apart from the extensive sausage and cheese sections.