The story of West-Berlin's 58 subway stations, built between 1962 and 1994 by Rainer Gerhard Rümmler, Building Director at the West Berlin Public Building department. Some of these subway stations like Konstanzer Strasse or Fehrbelliner Platz are icons of 70s West-German architecture.
Verena Pfeiffer-Kloss, Der Himmel unter West-Berlin: die post-sachlichen U-Bahnhöfe des Baudirektors Rainer Gerhard Rümmlers. Berlin: Urbanophil, 2019. Paperback, 381 pp. 24 x 17cm.
The book is new. Language: German.
"The sky under West Berlin" by Verena Pfeiffer-Kloss is the story of the 58 underground stations of the building director Rainer Gerhard Rümmler, which he built between 1962 and 1994 for the West Berlin underground.
19 of these subway stations have been included in the Berlin list of monuments since 2017 and 2018, with the collaboration of the author. Rainer Gerhard Rümmler (July 2nd, 1929 – May 16th, 2004) worked for 30 years as building director at the senate building administration of the half-city West Berlin.
During this time, he and the staff in his “Architectural Planning” department designed more than 100 high-rise buildings in addition to the underground stations: fire stations, police stations, courthouses, swimming pools, schools, restaurants, suburban railway stations and noise protection walls on the city motorway. A selection of these buildings is shown in the book using drafts, plans and photos.
The focus, however, is on the subway stations, which represent Rümmler's main work both quantitatively and architecturally and are presented in this publication for the first time in their entirety, comprehensively and from an architectural and urban historical perspective. Approximately 300 illustrations show previously unpublished material such as plans, drawings, and drafts from Rümmler's estate and numerous historical photos of the underground stations. (See pictures)
The last five pictures are not in the book. They are pictures we took ourselves in some of the Rümmler subway stations on U7.