Tegel airport is being eyed up as a new venue – but plans are meeting with ambivalence as clubbers see their subculture becoming more mainstream

Berlin’s clubbing scene has long taken a creative approach to issues of space, setting events in former power stations, drained swimming pools and public toilets. Now its main airport is joining the list of alternative venues.

With Tegel airport set to close following the long-awaited opening of Berlin Brandenburg airport, currently scheduled for October 2020, plans are already being made for the next chapter in its history. Last month Berlin’s culture minister, Klaus Lederer, and Lutz Leichsenring of the Club Commission joined project planners for a tour of Tegel to imagine it reborn as a nightclub.

Tegel’s air traffic control towers, expansive hangar and soundproof jet engine testing hall were highlighted as potential spaces for a mixture of temporary and permanent music venues for open-air festivals, studios and clubs. The vision for Tegel also includes new housing and a tech hub.

“A whole new district of the city will be born,” says Daniel Bartsch, spokesman for Lederer. “I think Tegel will become a figurehead for the city’s modernity and diversity.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The “noise protection hall” of Berlin’s Tegel Airport that, in future, could be an open air-stage. The image was taken on a tour of the site by the culture minister ahead of plans to turn the airport into a multi-use complex, including a club. Photograph: Gerhard Kassner/Gerhard Kassner / Tegel Projekt

Leichsenring was especially enthusiastic about the possibilities of a basement space he was shown complete with metal pipes, machinery and a readymade industrial aesthetic: “It reminded me of the space underneath the swimming pool in Stattbad Wedding, a former club in Berlin.”

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Architecture is important to Berlin’s clubbing scene, Leichsenring says: “The Berlin scene doesn’t want anything too clean or chic. It focuses instead on the basics: having a good soundsystem and good bookings. And it is always good to have a building where you see the history when you walk in. Berlin clubs like to work with the shape and the soul of the building.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest A plan for Tegel airport. Illustration: Atelier Loidl

Situated 8km north-west of the city centre, Tegel’s site was originally used for rocket testing during the second world war and was set to be turned into allotments due to severe bomb damage. However, the first plane landed there in November 1948 after a runway was built in just 90 days to help support Tempelhof airport during the Berlin airlift, when Allied forces in the late 40s broke the Soviet blockade of west Berlin by airlifting goods in directly. It’s been the city’s key passenger airport since the 1970s.

Tegel has been operating far longer than intended, though, with the Berlin-Brandenburg originally due to open in 2012. Technical issues, scandals and multiple delays in its construction have turned it into a running joke among Berliners, with a majority voting to keep Tegel open in a nonbinding referendum last year. Critics, however, argue Tegel’s concrete hexagonal terminal building and infrastructure are ill-equipped to meet the city’s growing number of air passengers.

Normally the clubbing scene itself decides what could be an interesting or sexy site Ben de Biel

Clubbing has also changed a lot in recent decades, as the formerly countercultural scene has been subsumed into the city’s brand. “When the Club Commission was set up in 2000, the club scene was associated with drugs and criminals,” says Leichsenring. “Now it is widely accepted to be part of the DNA and appeal of the city.”

He founded the Creative Footprint nonprofit organisation to research live music venues in the city and protect its nightlife from the increasing pressures of regulation, rising rents and property development. “It is very important that with Tegel we talk about building additional clubbing space for the city, and not somehow giving up what we already have,” he says. “Over the years many, many clubs have had to close.”

Ben de Biel, a photographer and former club owner, laments the lack of suitable sites: “In the first few years after the wall fell there were so many empty spaces. The first club I opened was in 1991 in an illegally squatted set of flats. It was easy: we found a house, had a look around, broke in, changed the locks and then started a club. Today there is little affordable empty space for clubs left.”

De Biel says Tegel’s remote location is less likely to be a drawback to clubbers than the process of its development. He can point to a number of clubs that have thrived outside the S-Bahn train line circling the city centre, but adds: “Normally the clubbing scene itself decides what could be an interesting or sexy site.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Inside Berghain, one of Berlin’s most famous nightclubs. Photograph: Fabrizio Bensch/Reuters

Sven von Thülen, DJ and co-writer of the Sound of Family, an oral history of the Berlin clubbing scene, is sceptical of the plans. “I cannot see people from Berlin actually going there,” says Thülen. “I can only see it being a tourist trap.

“For a long time Berlin clubs were about reclaiming the city and revitalising forgotten spaces. They were developed from the bottom up … Tegel could be an interesting physical space but it would be a top-down development, a kind of sanitised place.”



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Considering the ongoing saga of the new Brandenburg airport, it is unlikely Berlin clubbers will get the chance to head to Tegel any time soon. Yet the ambivalence over the proposed club feels fitting in a city that has seen its clubbing subculture become mainstream and its previously squatted venues turn into prime real estate.

Leichsenring is keen to ensure the Tegel redevelopment is an opportunity for smaller grassroots groups to develop organically. He envisages it as not only an open-air festival space, but a site for exhibitions, creative agencies, markets, recording studios and rehearsal rooms.

“The clubbing scene in Berlin doesn’t need any more commercial spaces,” he says. “We need more accessible space for experimentation, for new sounds, and for communities. We don’t want one club where you can just drop 5,000 people in there at the weekend – we want lots of smaller creative cells, and these spaces don’t need lots of investment.

“You basically just have to rip everything out of them and start the first party.”

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