Schwerbelastungskörper

“Big ambitions require big ways to figure out if they actually have any grounds to stand on.”

The Schwerbelastungskörper, or load-bearing body, is a massive concrete structure built in 1941 that was designed to conduct subsoil testing and surveying for feasibility studies in Berlin. During the Nazi regime, Hitler and his chief architect Albert Speer reimagined Berlin as the “New World Capital.”¹ Because the envisioned buildings and structures were so ambitious in their physical scale, it was decided to examine whether the sand-marshy soil in Berlin could sustain such heavy loads.
        The cylinder’s structure is eighteen meters deep into the ground, fourteen meters above ground, and weighs twelve-thousand-six-hundred-and-fifty tons. It holds two underground instrument chambers where undisturbed soil sampling was collected and analyzed.
        Construction started in 1941 by the forced labor of French prisoners of war² at the borough of Tempelhof in center-south Berlin, that was to be the anchor point of the North-South axis of future Germania. Once the measurements and testing had been completed, the underground cylinder was to be covered and used as a foundation to erect the north-east pillar of the four-pillared, planned “Great Triumphal Arch.” Its construction halted by the end of WWII, the pillar was resurveyed and revealed that the structure had sunk nineteen centimeters and had tilted three-and-a-half centimeters at maximum, indicating that the soil was insufficient to sustain building construction without additional reinforcement and prior ground consolidation.
        It was used as an engineering test site by the Technische Universität Berlin and the German Society for Soil Mechanics until the 1980s, and then was declared a historical monument in 1995. Today, it is an information center, open to the public, as part of the urban development of West Berlin. It sticks out of the ground as a remnant retaining wall engulfed by wild vegetation and the smell of grand political ambitions.

Image source: Section of the Schwerbelastungskörper (Diaarchiv Degebo, TU-Berlin)