LETTER FROM BERLIN
Berlin would not be Berlin without a major controversial project. After the scandals that marked the construction of the new airport, inaugurated in 2020 eight years behind schedule, after the controversies aroused by the creation of the Humboldt Forum, a cultural center opened in 2021 in a replica of the former castle of kings of Prussia, it is another architectural project which is currently being debated in the German capital: the extension of the Federal Chancellery.
Inaugurated in 2001, ten years after the vote on the law transferring the institutions of reunified Germany from Bonn to Berlin, its current headquarters has only 460 work places, which was sufficient at the time but is no longer so. today. Over the years, the staff of the chancellery has continued to increase: around 750 people are currently attached to it, of whom a third have their offices elsewhere in Berlin due to lack of space in the main building, famous for its huge round window in porthole shape which has earned it the nickname “federal washing machine”.
In order to bring together all the staff on the same site, the Chancellery has therefore decided to expand. Drawn up by the firm of Axel Schultes and Charlotte Frank, the architects who designed the current building, the extension project notably includes a six-storey U-shaped building housing 400 offices, a heliport and a few ancillary buildings, the all on a plot of 60,000 square meters located in the extension of that, of about the same size, where the current chancellery is located, on the other side of the river Spree, a bridge also being planned to connect the two sets.
While the site is due to start at the end of the year for delivery scheduled for 2028, the amount is the subject of a lively controversy. When the project was studied in 2018, it was valued at 457 million euros. Since then, the bill has continued to be revised upwards. At the end of 2020, there was talk of 600 million euros. The latest estimate, published in September, now amounts to the work at 777 million euros.
Strong upward revaluation of the cost of works
Due to the rise in construction prices, themselves driven up by soaring raw material prices, this sharp upward revaluation of the cost of future work is going badly at a time when the government is increasing calls for sobriety. , that inflation weighs on the purchasing power of Germans and that the country is about to enter a recession.
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