The district at Potsdamer Platz was one of Europe’s biggest private-sector urban construction projects and was planned a team of international architects under the leadership of Renzo Piano. Today, it is an inner-city district accommodating 10,000 jobs, and its varied facilities are used by between 70,000 and 100,000 people every day. The district at Potsdamer Platz comprises 19 buildings, 10 streets and two plazas, and has a total floor space of 500,000 square meters.
The decision by the former Daimler-Benz AG to acquire a piece of land at Potsdamer Platz was made at a time when the fall of the Berlin Wall and the reunification of Germany seemed inconceivable. The DaimlerChrysler Group – which has been represented in Berlin since 1902 with sales and production activities – had already decided in 1989 to locate its newly founded services subsidiary, debis AG ( now DFS Daimler Financial Services), in Berlin.
The city-state of Berlin offered a piece of land on the western side of Potsdamer Platz for the new construction, which the Board of Management decided to acquire in the late summer of 1989. A completely new situation arose with the fall of the Berlin Wall on November 9, 1989: Over night, Potsdamer Platz had been shifted from the edge of the western half of the city into the center of a united Berlin. The construction plans, originally focused on the Group’s own needs, had to be changed fundamentally. The investor realized that it had a special responsibility to take an active part in the redesign of the center of a new, undivided Berlin, and to make a contribution towards effecting some fundamental changes.
The goal was to create a new, vital district at Potsdamer Platz that would be alive all around the clock. The land was acquired in 1990. The urban-design competition took place in 1991 and the architectural competition in 1992. The foundation stone was laid in 1994; four years later, the district was inaugurated on October 2, 1998.
