A farewell to Tegel

Jesse Simon bids an emotional ‘adieu’ to one of the city’s cold war concrete throwbacks…

When Tegel Airport finally closed early in November of 2020, it had a mere 2.7 stars out of five on Google Maps. Visitors appreciated the funky hexagonal design, although some said the terminal building was dated and the amenities could be improved. And those were the positive reviews.

The litany of complaints levelled at Berlin’s primary airport over the years were many and wide-ranging: it was small, it was ugly, it was hard to get there by public transit, there wasn’t enough flight-side seating and almost nothing in the way of decent shops and services. Even its most loyal apologists—and there were many—were forced to concede that the experience of Tegel was worlds away from the sleek and sterile modernity that awaits the traveller in the airports of nearly every other European capital.

How, then, does one begin to argue that this flawed holdover was not merely one of the last great airports of the twentieth century, but also a crucial Berlin institution? With the long-delayed Berlin Brandenburg (BER) now open and a dormant Tegel waiting out the statutory six-month period before its now-inevitable decommission, it is worth saying a few words in praise of this unlikely icon of Berlin, and why the city will be immeasurably poorer without it.

Like so many people who move to Berlin on a whim in their twenties and end up staying for the rest of their lives, Tegel Airport was a temporary solution that became permanent almost by accident. Although the large cleared section of the Jungfernheide Forest just south of the village of Tegel (now part of the borough of Reinickendorf) had been used for military training during the Second World War, it was only in 1948, during the Berlin Blockade, that an airfield was first constructed on the site.

It spent its first decade as a French military base—Reinickendorf was, at the time, located in the French sector of Allied-occupied West Berlin—and was pressed into commercial service in 1960 primarily because its runway was long enough to accommodate the newer, larger aircraft which could not land at Tempelhof.

The period of economic recovery in the post-war years witnessed a boom in commercial air travel, and while much of West Berlin’s flight traffic was centred around Tempelhof, there were enough planes passing through Tegel that the city soon decided to replace the pre-fab shack with a new purpose-built terminal. At a time when many European capitals were building or rebuilding their major airports far outside the city centre, the city of West Berlin, a walled enclave surrounded on all sides by East Germany, was more limited in its choices.

Although there were other suburban airfields within the Allied controlled territory—at Staaken and Gatow, both at the extreme western edge of Berlin—Tegel was by far the more convenient location. In 1965, the design competition for a new terminal was won by Meinhard von Gerkan, Volkwin Marg and Klaus Nickels, a trio of young architects who had not yet built any major projects, but who impressed the jury with an entirely new concept for air travel: instead of a central hall with long corridors leading to the gates, the hexagonal terminal would place arriving passengers no more than thirty metres from their gate, while providing the same number of jet-bridges as a traditional departure hall.

Unlike Tempelhof, the new terminal at Tegel was also designed specifically for the automobile age, with an internal loop for pick-ups and drop-offs, and ample parking directly beneath the departures area. Construction on the new terminal began in 1970. When it was completed near the end of 1974 most of the major carriers relocated f…