UPD: although the court ordered to dismantle the suspended ceiling of the underground station hall and at least attach the vaults to it, originally conceived by gmp, as a result, Deutsche Bahn AG, by agreement of the parties, paid a fine for arbitrariness in favor of a charitable organization.
The complex of the Main Station, worth 700 million euros, opened in May 2006 after 13 years of construction. It is located in the city center, in the former border zone between East and West Berlin. The structure also overlooks the Spree River and the building of the Chancellor's Office.
During construction, the customer, Deutsche Bahn AG, shortened the length of the upper platform by almost a third, despite protests from Meinhard von Gerkahn and the architects of his workshop. As a result, when viewed from the street, the building became asymmetrical, which was also noted by former Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder, whose office windows overlooked the station; he even compared it to a "bitten sausage." But the underground hall was more seriously damaged: there the customers replaced the vaulted ceilings of the underground platform hall with flat ones. Most of the passengers using the station pass through this hall (300 thousand daily), and von Gerkan strove to turn it into a "cathedral of transport" in the spirit of huge stations at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries. Now its appearance has been radically changed for the worse, the lightness and elegance inherent in the project has gone.
It was the latest distortion of gmp's plans that the court considered. Deutsche Bahn AG was accused of copyright infringement, but its representatives tried to prove that all changes to the project were made due to the prohibitively high cost of implementing the gmp project, which allegedly could not fit into the budget laid down in the architectural competition. The architects objected that Deutsche Bahn AG had not made any such statements before, and that traces of forgery were visible in the financial documents they had seen.
The radical decision of the court - the rebuilding of the ceilings of the main platform - is due to the fact that this very space is the "public face" of the station, which is seen by the majority of Berliners and city guests. Deutsche Bahn AG filed an appeal, stating that the work would require the station to be closed for three years at a cost of € 40 million. The gmp architects, for their part, argue that all this will cost no more than 20 million euros, and the station will not need to be closed at all.
This verdict is a significant step forward in the legal field for architects throughout Europe. Precedents of such processes, especially with the unconditional victory of architects offended by customers, are extremely rare, and on such a gigantic scale they did not exist at all. Now German architects are hoping their clients will be more careful with their designs for fear of litigation.
