The idea for an East Berlin TV tower was born of necessity — a Cold War broadcasting battle raged in the airwaves above the divided city in the 1950s. But during planning, which coalesced around the closing of the West German border in 1961, the project transformed. Officials began to envision the TV tower as the crown jewel of a central socialist square. That it would be prominently visible from West Berlin was a bonus, demonstrating to all that the true center of the city was in the East. That it could not have been built without Western materials and engineers, that it became one of the few places where East Germans could get a glimpse of West Berlin, that crown jewels were antithetical to the young republic’s guiding philosophy — these were minor details, less important than ostentatiously asserting the new state’s identity. I loved the Fernsehturm from the moment I first moved to Berlin several years ago, after college. I quickly internalized the did-you-know facts about it that a tour guide recited ....
In the grand tradition of young mopes in Europe, I began taking walks. Whenever I got lost or confused, I would find the TV tower to orient myself. This had the effect of reconfiguring me spiritually as well. The Fernsehturm’s strangeness forced me to think about the conditions that led the G.D.R. to stake a big, shiny claim in the middle of town. In relation to that history, my problems were made minuscule.
Architecture doesn’t usually look like the present; it structures our sense of the past and tries to predict the future. Mostly constructed in the mid to late 20th century and ranging in appearance from Moscow’s surprisingly benign Ostankino Tower to the malevolent Zizkov Television Tower that lords over Prague, television towers stand in the middle of this continuum. They steer us away from romanticism, warning that history is not all Corinthian columns and copper domes. But they also broadcast a moving optimism in their charming awkwardness: Perhaps this looks odd now, but in a few years we’ll evolve, and then it’ll all make sense.
Of course, TV towers only ended up looking weirder. They do not make space for life or work; they do not elevate the population, just the idea of it. I suspect their function — transmitting radio and television signals — could soon be made irrelevant. Although they are just as historical as a Baroque cathedral, their particular ugliness exposes them as acts of premature anticipation rather than forward-thinking triumphs of the ideologies that birthed them. ...