METRO STATION BUNDESTAG

A chancellor’s metro line, a chancellor’s station … no, not quite that – a station ‘Civic Forum’ should have happened there, once upon a time. With the parliament’s betrayal – to eliminate the street right across the forum, once the tunnel is in use – the last chance will be lost to establish a place of its own right, for the sovereign, for the citizen. From now on this ‘forum’ will be just a nothing, a nothing of two front yards for big policy, a desert where people might stick their noses through the fence of the chancellery.

The spacial concept of the station depends on that so-called forum: – the galleries high up on both sides of the tracks have lost their meaning. They where conceived as a generous, wide open access to the parliament and opposite to an important place underneath the forum: – to the main exhibition on two hundred years of the development of German democracy, the ‘Questions on German History’.

The uncommon depth of the tracks, eight meters beyond surface, helps to create a relatively big spacial volume, allows a quality quite rarely found in Berlin metro stations: – daylight, to give a nice sustainability on energy consumption, a nice orientation a priori, a nice open atmosphere with the glow of the light-green stone covering all floors of the station.

And one shouldn’t think bad about the thick ceiling and the thick columns: – all that is calculated to carry the load of six-storey buildings, if ever the forum will come into being.

SITE

Paul-Löbe-Allee  Otto-von-Bismarck-Allee
10557 Berlin

TYPOLOGY

Subway station

CLIENT

Berliner Verkehrsbetriebe (BVG)
Senatsverwaltung für Stadtentwicklung  Berlin

ARCHITECT

Axel Schultes Architekten
Frank  Schultes  Witt

DESIGN

Axel Schultes    Charlotte Frank

PROJECT MANAGEMENT

Christoph Witt

COLLABORATORS

Hiby   Reintjes

PLANNING  –  COMPLETION

1994  –  2007

AREA CONCOURSE

1.450 m²

LENGTH STATION

147 m

WIDTH PLATFORM

30 m

HEIGHT CONCOURSE

6 m

CONSTRUCTION

reinforced concrete  fair-faced concrete

STRUCTURAL ENGINEER

GSE Ingenieurgesellschaft mbH
Spie Batignolles

LIGHTING DESIGNER

Licht-Kunst-Licht GmbH

STRUCTURAL WORK

Spie Batignolles

PHOTOS

Stefan Müller