Kreuzberg Tower and Wings
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The Kreuzberg Tower and Wings are a complex of three buildings, designed by the American architect John Hejduk. Located close to Checkpoint Charlie, the project was completed in 1988, shortly before the Berlin Wall came down in 1989. It is considered an iconic work of 20th-century architecture, and one of very few that Hejduk realised during his lifetime.
In 1979, International Building Exhibition Berlin — known as "IBA" in German — was initiated. Focused on a shortage of social housing in West Berlin, it became the largest urban renewal effort in Europe at the time.[1] One of the inner city areas chosen for redevelopment was the southern Friedrichstadt quarter. Hejduk submitted an urban design plan for a competition held in 1981. Whilst he did not win, the director of IBA Neubau (New Buildings), Josef Paul Kleihues, was impressed by Hejduk's ideas[2] and invited him to propose a building project for an empty plot — number 11 — between Kochstrasse and Charlottenstrasse (in additional to two other plots, in Tegel[3] and on Friedrichstrasse[4]). The initial brief included two low-level residential blocks that were scaled to the neighbouring historic buildings. In addition, Hejduk was asked to design a residency for The DAAD Artists-in-Berlin Program.
At this point in time, Hejduk was best known as the Dean of the Cooper Union School of Architecture in New York, and as an architect whose output mostly consisted of poetry,[5] drawings, and publications.[6] The critic Herbert Muschamp described him in the New York Times as:
"the consummate paper architect, an artist who has shirked off the cumbersome apparatus of conventional practice and created entire cities of the mind. His drawings, often gathered together in the form of 'masques,' set forth an elaborate personal mythology of angels, medusas, watchtowers, condemned men and other allegorical figures. In these cerebral cityscapes, buildings often resemble costumed performers. They act out the idea that architecture can be as solitary a pursuit as poetry or painting."[7]
Together with Cooper Union graduate Moritz Müller as contact architect in Berlin, Hedjuk worked on the designs between 1984-87.[8] Upon completion, the DAAD Artists-in-Berlin Program did not move into the tower. Instead, all 55 apartments across the three buildings were given over to social housing, in what was, at the time, a largely Turkish Gastarbeiter demographic in Kreuzberg.