Finally, A Plan For The Long-Abandoned International Congress Centre
After 12 years sitting empty and a long hunt for investors, West Berlin's futuristic spaceship will become an art and culture centre — plus hotels and retail.
The International Congress Centre, or ICC, is often thought of as Berlin's spaceship — a giant silver piece of the West Berlin skyline, futurist in design and optimistic in its scale. When it was constructed in 1975, it cost nearly a billion Marks and was the largest meeting centre in Europe, with a capacity for 5,000 guests. The UN held its first climate change conference at the ICC in 1995; The Bourne Ultimatum and The Hunger Games were filmed there.
But for more than a decade, the vast shell of the ICC has been abandoned, shut down in 2014 after the discovery of rampant asbestos. The city has spent years trying to revitalise the ICC, launching a global search for investors and tried to convince someone to take on the millions of euros in maintenance costs to create a "Berlin Centre Pompidou".
The ICC is a landmark of Berlin. We want it to once again become a place for art, culture, the creative economy, and encounters.
HEIST is a worker-owned online magazine, founded by writers and editors who after years working across Berlin's media landscape believed something essential was missing.
Anyone living here has felt a growing gap between the city as it actually is and the version being served up by mainstream outlets. We experienced that disconnect firsthand. We saw political censorship shape coverage decisions and felt the weight of billionaire ownership land directly on our work. It reached a point where we could either keep going along with it, or try to build something better.
That's why we created HEIST.
And look at you: scrolling, clicking, squinting at blurred text just to get a little further. If you'll go to that much effort to read HEIST, you can surely give us one email. That's the whole price, and the rest of the story is right behind it.
Real journalism costs money. We commission the hard-hitting, well-reported, long-form work everyone wants to read but nobody seems to publish anymore.
The future of this city is still in the balance. We intend to be part of that struggle. We hope that you'll join us.
