Inside Berlin's Abandoned Cold War Airport

TL;DR

Tegel Airport was built in 90 days by 19,000 civilians to save West Berlin during the Soviet blockade and now awaits redevelopment.

Key Points

• 1.Tegel was built in 90 days during the 1948 Soviet blockade. Over 19,000 volunteers, civilians, students, and local businesses worked rotating shifts on a former artillery range in the French sector to create a functional runway and relieve pressure on Templehof and Gatow airports.
• 2.The Berlin Airlift it supported was a massive humanitarian operation. Over 11 months, 200,000+ flights delivered 2.3 million tons of food, coal, fuel, and medicine — one plane landing every 90 seconds — keeping 2.5 million West Berliners alive.
• 3.Two architects in their late 20s designed the iconic 1974 hexagonal terminal. Meinhard von Gerken and Volkmar Marg won a design competition with a concept rooted in their university thesis, creating a car-centric hexagonal layout where passengers could go from car to plane in as little as 15 minutes.
• 4.The hexagonal design was obsessively consistent throughout the building. Columns, beams, ceilings, lift towers, staircases, and even floor plates all used the hexagonal motif, making it a unified modernist statement representing West Berlin's resilience and self-reliance during Cold War isolation.
• 5.Tegel outlived its planned closure due to Berlin Brandenburg Airport's decade-long delays. By 2019 it handled 24 million passengers yearly — far beyond its designed half-city capacity — before its final Air France flight to Paris on November 8, 2020.
• 6.The redevelopment site is riddled with live ordnance dating back to 1875. EOD teams have uncovered nearly 900 kg of ordnance and 30,000 kg of munition scrap across 22,000 m² by May 2021, with clearance operations expected to continue until end of 2026.
• 7.The abandoned airport is being transformed into a major urban district. Plans include a university inside the terminal, the Urban Tech Republic innovation park, a 5,000-unit sustainable 'sponge city' neighborhood, and over 200 hectares of protected dry grassland habitat.