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The uncertain future of Berlin’s former Sport- und Erholungszentrum (SEZ) is being taken beyond planning offices and preservation circles and put directly before the public. Opening on 28 August, SEZ – Un/Möglichkeit einer Insel uses exhibition-making as a form of architectural advocacy, asking Berliners to reconsider a building caught between preservation, redevelopment and demolition.

Gerd Danigel, ddr-fotograf.de, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Opened in 1981, the SEZ was one of the GDR’s largest leisure and sports centres. Its swimming pools, sports facilities, restaurants and event spaces embodied an ambitious model of collective recreation, attracting thousands of Berliners. After reunification, it progressively lost that role and has since become a contested piece of DDR-era modernism whose architectural significance, social history and development potential remain unresolved.

Curated by Kay Fingerle and Ludwig Heimbach, the exhibition is presented by BHROX bauhaus reuse and Deutscher Werkbund Berlin in cooperation with Charlottenburg-Wilmersdorf district. Photographs, historical documents, architectural analysis and contemporary perspectives are being used not simply to document the SEZ but to construct a public conversation about what it might become.

The exhibition treats communication not as documentation after an architectural decision, but as a means of influencing the conditions in which that decision is made.

The setting makes the argument particularly effective. BHROX bauhaus reuse, on the central island of Ernst-Reuter-Platz, is itself assembled from reused façade elements salvaged from the Bauhaus building in Dessau. A pavilion demonstrating circular construction is therefore hosting a debate about whether another inherited structure should be retained, transformed or lost.

G.Elser, CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

The exhibition also forms part of a wider mobilisation around the SEZ. A parallel summer academy at feldfünf has brought architecture students from Aachen and Erfurt together to develop proposals for its retention and adaptation, with the resulting work presented publicly alongside existing reuse concepts.

For architects, the significance extends beyond Berlin or the fate of one building. Preservation campaigns increasingly operate through exhibitions, photography, visualisations, research, public events and carefully constructed narratives. These are familiar communications tools, but deployed early enough they can help establish cultural value, build constituencies and expand the range of futures considered politically or commercially possible.

Architectural communication can do more than explain a project: deployed before the brief is settled, it can help create the constituency for one.

Whether this campaign ultimately changes the SEZ’s fate remains uncertain. But it demonstrates a wider role for architectural communications: not simply promoting buildings once commissioned, but making the case for buildings, uses and development possibilities before a commission exists.

Further information
SEZ – Un/Möglichkeit einer Insel, BHROX bauhaus reuse
Sommerakademie zum SEZ Berlin, feldfünf