Internationales Congress Centrum Berlin

The Internationales Congress Centrum (ICC) Berlin, located in the Westend locality of the Berlin borough of Charlottenburg-Wilmersdorf, is one of the largest conference centres in Germany. It has been used for conventions, theatrical productions and concerts. Opened in 1979, by April 2014 it was closed in order to remove asbestos contamination, and remains closed as of 2025. In October 2021, it was temporarily reopened for the art project The Sun Machine Is Coming Down as part of the Berliner Festspiele. Overview Under the division of Germany, the ICC was built within the enclave of West Berlin. The enclave's prior conference venue, the Kongresshalle (now Haus der Kulturen der Welt), had an outdated capacity of only 1,200 people. Additionally, the East German government headquartered in East Berlin had begun construction in 1973 of the modernist Palace of the Republic, turning the construction of the ICC into an ideological soft power competition of the Cold War, intended to demonstrate the superiority of West Germany's social market economy model. Construction of ICC Berlin began in 1975 and it opened in 1979, three years after the opening of the Palace of the Republic. The architects were Ursulina Schüler-Witte and Ralf Schüler. The conference center is 313 metres (1,027 ft) long, 80 m (260 ft) wide and 40 m (130 ft) tall. With a cost of almost one billion marks, it was the most expensive construction in West Berlin at the time, eclipsing Hans Scharoun's postwar building for the Berlin State Library. The building has an aluminum facade and was designed to accommodate over 20,000 participants in any major conference. The conference center has 80 conference rooms of varying size, the largest conference room being 6,000 square meters. The main auditorium was planned for 5,000 people. Hall 2 could accommodate around 4,000 visitors. The commission was for a infrastructure project that was supposed to impress. So the participants of a conference could talk into a microphone from any seat. The staircases and foyers were intentionally futuristic, with geometric Op Art carpets for visitors to walk on and an innovative guidance system consisting of red and blue fluorescent tubes. The facility does not have its own campus and is linked to the neighboring Messe Berlin fairgrounds, so conferences often joined trade shows and exhibitions. It was one of Europe's biggest conference centers, at a time when Berlin was one of the top congress cities in the world. It is serviced by S-Bahn station Messe Nord/ZOB. By its own reckoning, ICC Berlin is a landmark of post-war German architecture and has served as an inspiration for similar facilities around the globe. Asbestos In April 2014, the ICC was closed in order to remove asbestos contamination. Its removal will cost much more than the originally planned €259 million. In popular culture The ICC features prominently in the disco musical The Apple (1980), in which it appears as a futuristic concert venue. Many of the film's exterior and interior scenes were filmed in and around the building. The venue appears in the Wim Wenders film Wings of Desire (1987). On 19 and 20 October 1990, the American rock band Grateful Dead played two concerts in the main hall at the ICC as part of their European tour. In 1999, the pedestrian tunnel was used as a set for the popular dance track "Around the World (La La La La La)" by German Eurodance group ATC. The film The International (2009) was partly filmed in the interior of the ICC. References External links Official website ICC Berlin descriptions Archived 9 May 2018 at the Wayback Machine Inside Europe's $1BN Abandoned Mega-Build (YouTube video, 17 minutes long, with 5.5 million views) The B1M, 20 February 2025