12.01.2025

New Adlergestell bridge in Berlin

Building design

The Adlergestell connects Adlershof with Schmöckwitz. Image source: Fridolin freudenfett, CC BY-SA 3.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

The six-lane Adlergestell is being widened by one lane – with a new bridge for pedestrians and cyclists. This will cross Berlin’s longest street at the level of Sonnenallee. The Senate Department for the Environment and Mobility announced last week that construction work on the Adlergestell Bridge will begin in December and last until 2024.

The six-lane Adlergestell is being widened by one lane – with a new bridge for pedestrians and cyclists. This will cross Berlin’s longest road at the level of Sonnenallee. The Senate Department for the Environment and Mobility announced last week that construction work on the Adlergestell Bridge will begin in December and last until 2024. Everything about the project here.

Berlin’s Adlergestell-Strasse is the longest in the capital. It is almost 12 kilometers long and crosses Niederschöneweide all the way to Schmöckwitz in the south-east. The Berlin-Görlitz railroad line runs parallel to Adlergestell. The partly six-lane road is not easy to cross for pedestrians. A new bridge is therefore now to be built. Since 2020, there has also been a cycle path here, which runs out of town between Sterndamm and Rudower Chaussee. The cycle path on Adlergestell, originally planned as a pop-up, is now being made permanent.

A new bridge for pedestrians and cyclists is to be built between Johannisthal and Adlershof by 2024. It will cross the six-lane Adlergestell at Sonnenallee. According to the Senate Department for the Environment and Mobility, construction work on this bridge over the Adlergestell is set to begin in December 2022.

The bridge will provide a car-free link between the Johannisthal Landscape Park in the south and Köllnische Heide in the north. Planning for the structure began in 2019 and has been completed since summer 2022.

The Adlergestell bridge is to start at the corner of Wagner-Régeny-Allee and Igo-Etrich-Straße. From there, there will be a ramp in a north-easterly direction. This means that the structure will cross both the six-lane federal highway 96a, the Adlergestell, and the railroad tracks. It ends around 200 meters north of Neltestraße. The planned paths are to be five meters wide.

According to the Senate Administration, a 74-metre-long truss bridge made of aluminum is planned. This will be combined with a shorter bridge made of solid reinforced concrete. This is the first time that aluminum has been used in the construction of a bridge in Berlin. The material is significantly less maintenance-intensive than steel. Stairs, ramps and generous curve radii guarantee that the Berlin Mobility Act is complied with. The slope ratio is to be a maximum of four percent.

The construction project is expected to cost 11 million euros. Traffic will only be restricted for a short time in order to install the truss bridge. This is currently planned for mid-2024.

The state of Berlin is represented for the bridge on Adlergestell by WISTA.Plan GmbH, the state’s development agency and trustee. The bridge is part of the development plan 9-60 for part of the former Schöneweide marshalling yard. This area is also known as “Gleislinse”. The city of Berlin would like to provide a much better pedestrian and cycle path connection here to facilitate supra-regional pedestrian and cycle traffic. The aim is also to strengthen the green corridor between the local recreation areas.

Another aim of the “Gleislinse” development plan is to provide Adlershof residents with a better connection to the “Active Center Dörpfeldstraße”. Among other things, this should help improve the route to school. The new bridge also upgrades the Sonnenallee path through the Am Adlergestell e.V. allotment site and provides a cycle path connection to Neltestraße.

Following a Europe-wide tender, Hentschke Bau GmbH was awarded the contract. At the junction, Adlergestell has three lanes in each direction, a grassed central reservation and ancillary facilities on both sides. The traffic routing is not to be changed. However, a reorganization of the ancillary facilities between the junction with Sonnenallee and Neltestraße is planned. In future, cycle traffic will be able to travel in both directions.

The “Berlin-Johannisthal/Adlershof” development measure began in 1994 and is the last of a total of six development areas in Berlin from the post-reunification period. With this planning instrument, municipalities and owners are obliged to plan targeted development. In Adlershof, there is a fiduciary development agency appointed by the municipality that acquires and develops plots of land and sells them as high-quality building land. The proceeds are used to finance the necessary public infrastructure. Funding is also available from the federal government and the EU.

Today, Adlershof Projekt GmbH is the trustee of the development measures. Together with WISTA Management GmbH, it is developing the 76-hectare science city. New sites are constantly being reactivated in Adlershof as a location for research, education and industry.

DB Netz AG is also joining the upward trend in Adlershof and wants to develop derelict railroad areas. The “Gleislinse” plays a central role here. It is located in the immediate vicinity of the Adlershof science, business and technology location. There are areas of various sizes here. 12 hectares consist of infrastructure, existing buildings, the listed depot, roads, squares and public green spaces. However, there are still vacant plots available for sale. Industrial companies can have their own rail connection to the DB freight rail network. There has also been a new streetcar line on the Groß-Berliner Damm since 2021.

By the way: another planned bridge in Berlin is the Mühlendamm Bridge.

11.11.2024

Event

Architecture Biennale 2021: In the Austrian Pavilion

Building design

Editor-in-chief Fabian Peters takes you to the 2021 Architecture Biennale in Venice.

Editor-in-chief Fabian Peters is currently in Venice. He is taking you on a tour of the pavilions, like here in the Austrian Pavilion.

In their project, the two curators of the Austrian pavilion, Peter Mörtenböck and Helge Mooshammer, examine the manifestations and effects of platform urbanism. As part of their research, they have ultimately identified and categorized the physical manifestations of the digital and platform industry that are typical of the times with great precision. To present their findings, Mörtenböck and Mooshammer chose different forms of presentation – both artistic and more documentary. The artistic approaches to the topic include the two slogans that greet visitors at the entrance to the two wings of the pavilion: “Access is the new capital” and “The platform is my boyfriend“.

An installation of stools has already been set up in front of the pavilion, allowing the words “we like” to be read from a distance and in an extremely “instagrammable” way. The stools are the kind of DIY furniture that can be found in countless internet companies today – especially those that have long since outgrown start-up status. Dozens of examples of such contemporary phenomena are depicted on two walls of the pavilion in the form of patent drawings – from the Corporate Campus and the Co-Working Headphones to the Food Truck and the Vertical Forest to the Corporate Bus and the Pop-up Container Market. They leave the interpretation of their findings to the visitors, who can stretch out on the pavilion terrace on the currently ubiquitous outdoor lounge furniture.

01.11.2024

Trick

Otto Dix in Colmar

Building design

A major Dix exhibition is currently running in Colmar. It focuses on the reception of the Isenheim Age by the German artist. A highlight of the show has been restored for the occasion. An insight. Since the beginning of October, the Unterlinden Museum in Colmar, Alsace, has been showing the major special exhibition “Otto Dix – Isenheim Altarpiece” and is exploring the extent to which […]

A major Dix exhibition is currently running in Colmar. It focuses on the reception of the Isenheim Age by the German artist. A highlight of the show has been restored for the occasion. An insight.

The Unterlinden Museum in Colmar, Alsace, has been showing the major special exhibition “Otto Dix – Isenheim Altarpiece” since the beginning of October and explores the extent to which Otto Dix’s work was influenced by Matthias Grünewald’s Isenheim Altarpiece. At the same time, the museum is also honoring the 125th anniversary of the artist’s birth and the 500th anniversary of the mural altar, the museum’s main attraction, which is on permanent display there.

“I saw the Isenheim Altarpiece twice, an enormous work of unheard-of boldness and freedom beyond all composition or construction and inexplicably mysterious in its contexts,” wrote Otto Dix to his wife Martha on September 9, 1945. This letter can be seen with more than 100 works by the painter at the Museum Unterlinden. Paintings, drawings, prints and archive material from all over the world, including loans from major public collections such as the Musée national d’art moderne in Paris, the MoMA in New York and the Vatican Museums.

The Isenheim Altarpiece, created by Matthias Grünewald in the 16th century, has inspired many artists such as Böcklin, Klee, Baselitz and Picasso since its rediscovery in the late 19th century. However, Dix referred to the Isenheim Altarpiece throughout his work, emphasizes curator Frédérique Goerig-Hergott.

Restored highlight

One of the highlights of the exhibition is the triptych “Madonna in front of barbed wire” from the Maria Frieden church in Berlin-Mariendorf, which is rarely lent out and has been restored by the museum’s conservators. It is the last triptych painted by Dix in 1945 and was intended for the Catholic chapel of the prison camp where Dix was sent shortly before the end of the Second World War. It shows the Virgin and Child as well as St. Paul and St. Peter in front of a crowd of prisoners of war and a landscape of houses destroyed by the war. “The most important part of the restoration was to check the adhesion of the paint layer and to locate any areas at risk of flaking. We also carried out a light cleaning of the paint layer, which meant minimal intervention in the paint substance,” explains restorer Carole Juillet. The wooden panels are in excellent condition and have been primed with gesso to prevent the wood from warping.

Examination of the painting revealed three different overpaintings. The oldest overpainting can be found in the area of the sky and the clouds in the middle panel. The overpaintings on the panel with St. Peter in the area of his cloak and in the area of Mary’s dress could be by Dix himself. The technique in oil/tempera is similar to that of the entire triptych. Juillet continues: “We have benefited greatly from this loan, as it is always interesting to be able to study an artist’s painting technique at close quarters and thus contribute a piece of the mosaic to Otto Dix research.”

Interested parties can view the restored painting with its overpaintings and its reference to Grünewald in the exhibition “Otto Dix – Isenheim Altarpiece” until January 30, 2017.