What is it to love a building, to love a place? At Berlin’s Tegel Airport (TXL), designed in the 1960s, it is certainly a functional admiration bordering on blind obsession, and also a fondness for everyone’s newest retro favorite: brutalism. Lively discussions about keeping Tegel open even after Berlin Brandenburg International (BER) opens have been shut down many times, with no actual airport shutdown in the face of the fact that BER, an embarassing failure, still has no opening date. Tegel lives on in the minds and hearts of many, and as an active airport. Retro-cool AND functional.
The disaster of Berlin Brandenburg International – its opening delayed repeatedly due to failed safety inspections and other issues, covered in uncube in part, and in international media outlets extensively – who doesn’t like German IN-efficiency? – helps people to love Tegel. But the fact of the matter is that Tegel is a great airport and a beloved place in the city. It is close to the city center, and it is a unique design from before the era of airport as big-box shopping center. Tegel was designed by architects Meinhard von Gerkan and Volkwin Marg, who hadn't a single built structure on their firm's CV when they were awarded the competition and project to design Tegel. (Almost half a century later, their firm has worked on BER as well.)
Their naive design for TXL is genius: a hollow octagon terminal has airplane gates on the outer side, and in the inside is lined with passenger entrances, accessed by a loop-the-loop circulation scheme. This design places passengers about 30 meters from their departure gate, or arrival exit. Now that is efficient. At Tegel there are no desperate runs to the gate if you know which gate you need. There’s no need for the duty-free shuffle.
Recently the Federal Transportation Ministry restated that Tegel will not be a secondary airport for longer than six months after BER opens, though numerous petitions have circulated to keep TXL operational as a second city airport like London's grab-bag assortment. Rumors that the new airport won't be able to handle capacity have fed the fervor to keep TXL, and with the continued night ban at Frankfurt Airport and a plan for an added runway at Munich Airport shot down by residents in June, air traffic increases could very well shift to Berlin. But, Tegel and its surrounds are slated to become a new tech hub, condos and outdoor space after the cessation of airtraffic. Yawn.
Confessions of love for Tegel have been Facebooked. Graphic designers have created support propaganda. The support for Tegel is not new, but is perhaps a wistful revival of an initiative which initially failed. In 2008 a referendum for keeping Tegel in operation did not manage to capture enough votes for the 25% minimum required. That was before people realized that dear Tegel might be gone forever. Sometimes we don’t realize how much we love things until it is too late.
(If you want some of your own "I LOVE (hexagon) TXL" swag, it can be purchased from the ilovetxl website.)
