Engineering the 'Spaceship'
In its latest informative film focused on engineering and construction, The B1M heads inside International Congress Centre Berlin, the massive, 313-meter-long “spaceship,” designed by Ralf Schüler and Ursulina Schüler-Witte in the 1970s, that opened in 1979, has sat empty since 2014, was listed in 2019, and is now looking for investors to reopen the building for cultural, creative, and other uses.
Between ICC Berlin being closed in 2014 for asbestos abatement and other repairs and the high-tech building being listed by the Berlin State Monuments Office in 2019, there were numerous calls to demolish the structure, no doubt due to its overbearing appearance but also the fact the building uses a lot of energy and is therefore very expensive to operate. At the same time, there were visions for reusing the building, such as one that kept the building operating as a congress center but would have covered it in a dome incorporating photovoltaics to power it renewably, and a more practical proposal by Jan Kleihues to preserve the existing structure but add a 29-story hotel at one end of it.
While the future operation of the building remains uncertain for now, the qualities of the 46-year-old structure are apparent in the tour of its main halls and other spaces by The B1M. The 16-minute film gives a quick history of the project, situating it within the political context of 1970s Berlin, but then heads inside to speak with Stephen Schwarz, a former senator and now an ICC ambassador, and explore the inside of the congress center, illustrating how the spaces work and how they fit together. Most valuable is seeing how the large trusses on the exterior enable the large spaces on the interior. A few photos from the film:
And the film, “Inside Europe's $1BN Abandoned Mega-Build”: