Disused Berlin power plant turns art centre

On weekend mornings, techno dance fans emerge from the basement of a vast, disused power plant in central Berlin, blinking in the daylight like moles.

This is the home of the underground club Tresor, a magnet for partygoers from across Europe. The DJs start mixing at midnight and the last stragglers leave around midday — presumably to head straight to bed.

Until November 28, they may cross paths with town planners and architects on their way into the old turbine hall above. Dimitri Hegemann, the founder and owner of Tresor, has adapted the cathedral-sized space into a venue for events and exhibitions. The first sprawling show, Realstadt (Real City), deals with urban development in Germany.

About 250 model cities or parts of cities, both real and imagined, are on display — too much to take in on one visit. One model shows communist East Germany’s vision for East Berlin, a city of modern high-rises that ends abruptly where the wall ran. Beyond are just empty grey spaces.

Leipzig’s planned Olympic village, a Hanover trash dump that doubles as a leisure park, Frankfurt’s banking district, Hamburg’s “Hafencity” port development and carefully restored medieval market places in eastern Germany are also on show.

An alarming model by Jakob Michael Birn, called “A Question of Lust”, shows a sinister, imaginary Berlin in 2057, with the yet-to-be-rebuilt royal palace on Unter den Linden adapted for the army. Sharpshooters keep watch from the roof of the cathedral.

The power plant was built by the East German regime in the same year — 1961 — and from the same concrete as the Berlin Wall and decommissioned a few years after the wall fell. A huge crane runs across the ceiling. The hall has an unfinished, industrial look. Hegemann has made it safe and accessible with metal staircases and railings, yet hasn’t undertaken a radical refit. The vastness of the space, with its aisles, steps and deep drops to lower floors, steals your breath.

“I prefer ruins to glamour,” Hegemann said during a tour of the plant before the exhibition opened. “And that’s what Berlin is about. This kind of off-the-wall culture is a marketing factor for the city.”

He has plans for the turbine hall that are almost as ambitious as some of the city visions it houses. In his view, Berlin lacks a central public venue for contemporary arts and he draws comparisons between the power plant and Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall in London.

Hegemann is talking about a show with James Turrell — the American light installation artist currently exhibiting at the Gagosian Gallery, London — and has invited Sasha Waltz’s dance company to perform.

‘Realstadt’ is an initiative of the German Transport and Construction Ministry. Still, Hegemann has secured no state support for the construction work and said he financed it piecemeal himself for about 2.5 million euros ($3.5 million).

“This is the space everyone has been waiting for,” he said, adding that he will be choosy about what it is used for. “I would rather have nothing in here than the wrong thing.”

In the hectic weeks of readying the power plant for the first exhibition, Hegemann invited some Tibetan monks to exorcise bad spirits and bless the building with chants and incense-burning.

“Everything went much more smoothly after that,” he said.