October 26th, 2015
Tempelhof Interior by by Alan Ford – Wikipedia
Berlin is still considering about the future of the former Tempelhof Airport Terminal buildings. This is prime real-estate in the most dynamic of European cities and yet there is no clear plan or consensus how to best utilize them.
Anyone who has been to Berlin or knows the city knows its first – and the world’s first real capital airport – namely Tempelhof. The Berliner Ring S-bahn passes by it and then one can appreciate how really big this area actually is.
However the Berlin municipal authorities are still in a quandray as to what to do with the mamouth and historical old Tempelhof terminal buildings.
What do you do with a massive building with such a vast amount of open space – 300 thousand sq/m of it in an un-interupted building? And this all sits on 3.5 square kilometers of prime real estate in the middle of Berlin.
Perhaps the city concil of Berlin is hesitent to take on any other large commitments for which they will be held to task because it seems that publicly owned projects in Berlin are not exactly ‘flavour of the month’.
Mention of projects like the new ‘BER Airport’ and the’ Staatsoper Unter den Linden’ send shivers through all local politicians and are aneathma to Berlin tax payers.
The ‘BER Berlin Brandenburg Airport’ presently is still “under construction” and was actually planned to open in 2010 and is now officially planned to open in 2018. [!] The total costs of the BER airport have since more than doubled and are now estimated at 5.3 billion Euro.
Each month, the BER airport is not opened, it cost taxpayers [according to the airport authority] circa 17 million Euro. It has encountered delays due to poor construction planning, bad management execution and corruption which are all very ‘un-German’ but seemed to have all merged in this project. The ‘Staatsoper Unter den Linden’ has been completely gutted and modernization costs have risen from 240 to 400 million Euro – this due to running up against unforeseen physical obstacles during the renovations.
In the meantime, as we write this – and it makes sense to do so as a temporary makeshift solution -some of this vast space in the old Tempelhof Terminal Buildings will be used to house the refugees fleeing their homes from war and strife in the Middle East and Afghanistan and coming to Germany . If you read German see – https://www.rbb-online.de/politik/thema/fluechtlinge/berlin/2015/10/fluechtlinge-ziehen-in-den-flughafen-tempelhof.html
This blog will update how the city state of Berlin is planning to use this newly acquired former airport and its adjacent buildings. Watch this space!