The former Tempelhof Airport, extending over approximately 3,800 dunams in the center of Berlin, is sort of a “last dinosaur”, one of the few remaining testaments to Hitler's plan of rebuilding the city center during the Nazi regime. As such, the controversial decision to shut it down in 2008 has opened an urban void in the midst of the city, as well as an historic one - a space of memory/non-memory. Tempelhof’s closing provided an opportunity to both confront its past and formulate spacial tools for its conservation and re-use.

The project deals with the unavoidable interaction between past and present, and with the moral and architectural dissonance between the seemingly permanent monumentality of the existing building, and the constant change of the city. Taking a Koolhaas approach of the triumph of urbanism over architecture, the programme chosen does not intend to commemorate the history of the place (Fascist architecture performs this role well on its own), but rather represent a dynamic temporal reality.

Tempelhof Messe, an international trade fair planned alongside and inside the airport complex, is a contemporary interpretation to the Nazi idea of Tempelhof as the gateway to Berlin. Facing the city, the existing structure maintains its complete exterior, with all of its historic and cultural significance. It functions as the entrance to the trade fair, over the “moat” and through the “city walls”, in both physical and metaphorical sense. Beyond the wall, a new city is revealed, planned according to two combined grids – a radial grid applied by the existing building, and a new orthogonal grid. The building’s bigness is resolved by confronting it with architecture just as big, and the heart of the project is at the meeting point of the old and the new, under the auspices of the roof formerly used for aircraft parking.