Berlin’s Tegel Airport Could Be Reborn as a Club Venue

The opening of Berlin’s long-awaited Brandenburg Airport – scheduled for 2020 – will see the closure of the city’s Tegel Airport (TXL). Though this closure is still over two years away, authorities in the German capital are already considering what to do with the soon-to-be former airport.

With Berlin’s Brandenburg Airport (BER) slated to open in October of 2020, authorities within the city are already considering how to utilize Tegel Airport (TXL), which will close when BER comes into operation.

Various plans are up for consideration, one of which, reports The Guardian, would see TXL turned into a nightclub and music venue. This particular plan would also see TXL provide space for homes, businesses, music studios and rehearsal rooms.

Klaus Lederer, the city’s culture minister, and Lutz Leichsenring of the Club Commission, a body which promotes Berlin’s club culture, toured TXL last month. Both see TXL as a natural choice for a club venue.

Daniel Bartsch, speaking on behalf of Lederer, was quoted by the outlet as saying, “A whole new district of the city will be born. I think Tegel will become a figurehead for the city’s modernity and diversity.”

Commenting on the utilitarian feel of the site – an aesthetic especially popular in Berlin’s current club scene – Leichsenring said, “The Berlin scene doesn’t want anything too clean or chic … Berlin clubs like to work with the shape and the soul of the building.”

Not everyone, however, sees TXL as a club venue.

Sven von Thülen, a DJ and co-author of The Sound of Family, a work tracing the development of electronic and house music in the city, said, “I cannot see people from Berlin actually going there.”

“For a long time Berlin clubs were about reclaiming the city and revitalizing 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 sanitized place,” he added.

Leichsenring, however, is eager to reiterate that the former airport would be a mixed-use space.

“The clubbing scene in Berlin doesn’t need any more commercial spaces. 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,” he explained.

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