The Ghost Spaceship of West Berlin
The ICC, once Europe’s largest conference centre, went from Cold War showcase to haunted relic
As a teenager in northern England between 1999 and 2003, I studied the Cold War obsessively in my GCSE and A-level history classes, with Berlin often at the center of it all. The Wall had only fallen a decade earlier, yet it may as well have been another century (actually, it was). The city, with its divided stage set, already felt like a relic: we’d watch grainy VHS footage of airlifts at Tempelhof, Soviet and US tanks facing off at Checkpoint Charlie, and silhouettes clambering over concrete. It had the same aura as the Cuban Missile Crisis or World War II – history, not memory. Part of that, I think, was the sheer velocity of the 1990s. The EU was expanding the idea of what it could be, the ideological battle supposedly won, and Britain was busy with Cool Britannia. The idea that a single city had once embodied two worlds fascinated me – though I never imagined I’d one day call Berlin home.
I’ve probably always been more drawn to the DDR (East Germany) as a “vanished state.” But Cold War West Berlin must have felt just as strange. Walled in and isolated, it became a place forever trying to prove that it wasn’t just viable, but modern, democratic, and somehow superior to the socialist neighbour pressing in on all sides.
For example, consider all the projects that East Berlin built to showcase its vision of a socialist society: Karl-Marx-Allee, a grand boulevard opened in the 1950s; the 368m-tall Berlin TV Tower, opened in 1969; and the Palace of the Republic, a bronze-tinted glass and steel behemoth exuding luxury for the people, which was opened in 1976.
It’s easy to imagine that West Berlin wanted to prove itself, and it did in fact realise several of its own ambitious ideas. In the late 1950s, it built a new model neighbourhood called Hansaviertel. The Interbau exhibition invited world-famous architects to design modernist towers and villas. It was sleek, light, open-plan – the anti-Stalinallee. Then, in 1963, West Berlin’s Philharmonie, designed by Hans Scharoun, was completed. This tent-like concert hall featured a curved, modern, democratic layout as a signal of creative freedom.
Then came 1979, and with it West Berlin’s most audacious project of all: the Internationales Congress Centrum, or ICC. At 320 metres long, 80 wide, and 40 high, it was the largest conference centre in Europe – so vast you could lay the Eiffel Tower on its side inside it. Where the Palace of the Republic had been a focal point for the people, complete with the DDR parliament, art galleries and exhibition spaces, not to mention a bowling alley and disco, the ICC was a spaceship-like hall of global assemblies. The building has been closed since 2014, but I jumped at the chance to visit the inside on a rare open day at the beginning of September.
Wandering through this time capsule of a building, I got the feeling this was a megastructure built on equal parts optimism and paranoia; it was meant to prove that West Berlin could host the world even while cut off from it. The total project cost was between €1.4 and € 1.5 billion in today’s money, accounting for inflation. It broke ground in 1973 and was completed by 1979.
At first, it was a hit. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, I can imagine this place was buzzing at times. It hosted concerts, as well as hundreds of international congresses and medical conferences, including those in cardiology, oncology, engineering, and chemistry – the kind of events that draw tens of thousands of delegates. Plus, its direct link to the Messe exhibition halls across the road made it uniquely flexible. Exhibitions on one side, plenary sessions and keynotes in the ICC. Events like ITB Berlin (the world’s biggest travel fair) used both venues together.
But over time, things changed. By the 2000s, it wasn’t getting enough bookings to justify its running costs. Heating, cooling, and lighting a 320-metre spaceship was a drain, especially once competition grew from newer, more efficient venues in Frankfurt, Munich, Hamburg, and even Berlin’s Estrel Convention Center. Moreover, the ICC was contaminated with sprayed asbestos insulation from its 1970s construction. By the 2010s, deterioration meant the fibres could no longer be safely sealed in. So in 2014, it shut down. And has remained shut ever since.
The ICC’s architectural style can best be described as high-tech modernism with a touch of brutalism. It shares similarities with the Centre Pompidou in Paris in its inside-out, machine-like aesthetic, as well as the multi-purpose concrete ethos of the Barbican Centre in London. Its scale is overwhelming; you could walk for hours and never see it all. The fact that it remains essentially unchanged from its inception in 1979 gives it an eerie quality, as if it were haunted by the ghosts of another era that never existed, as if history had spun off into a parallel timeline. Walking around and getting a sense for this building brought feelings of past optimism and present melancholy. Was it progressive or dystopian? I haven’t fully decided. But even the slightly more modern touches, such as the 2000s signage denoting “Wi-Fi hotspots,” feel grounded in a time where most of us were convinced that an increasingly connected world was a liberating and united rather than dividing and shackling force.
I’d best describe the feelings I got as a mix of the TV show Severance and the movie Blade Runner. Maybe the fact that neither work of art is a rose-tinted depiction of the future says a great deal. I know the word ‘liminal’ gets overused. Still, the ICC is precisely that: a place designed for thousands, now suspended in eerie in-betweenness. Think of airports during the early days of COVID, empty shopping malls, or school corridors during summer break. The ICC is all of these rolled into one – a spaceship-like behemoth designed to host the world, sitting in silence. While it shut down a little over 10 years ago, like my teenage fascination with the Cold War, it feels like it may as well have been another century ago. Perhaps it’s just evidence that I’m becoming old enough to remember – or proof of how quickly the future itself can turn into history.
A note on the images
I love talking about camera gear and photography, but I realise that also bores some of you. For those interested, I took all the pictures inside the ICC wiht a mix of my Leica M6 using Kodak Pro Image and Harman Phoenix II 200 (a new funky experimental colour film), my digital Leica M11 and my new-ish medium format film camera – a Hasselblad 500 C/M, using Kodak Gold 200 and my last ever roll of Fujifilm Pro 400H (a discontinued colour negative film stock).
You’ve made it to the end!
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A really interesting story illustrated with some great images. Thank you for sharing, Ari.
I really love the photos in this post, how you play with the light and shadows. Also a very interesting piece to read, thanks for that!