BERLIN DESK - According to a spokesperson for the General Services Administration, the firm of Moore Ruble Yudell Architects and Planners (Moore Ruble), were recently awarded the design architecture contract for the new federal courts building for downtown Fresno. The local Fresno Bee played a story on the firm in Sunday's paper.
What has not been revealed neither by the GSA nor the Fresno Bee, however, is that Moore Ruble is the same firm doing the architectural make over of the former U.S. Embassy building at Berlin's Brandenburg Gate and Hitler's former Foreign Ministry.
Close to the Reichstag the seat of German federal authority and to the Federal Chancery, the center of German government, the U.S. Embassy at Pariser Platz will again be located in the political heart of Berlin and of Germany.
The Berlin and Nazi Party connection between an agent of Hitler's Third Reich and that agent's role in Fresno redevelopment and planning in the 1960's was recently chronicled in the Fresno Daily Republican feature Secret life an American Nazi.
Berlin officials told the Daily Republican they expect the new U.S. Embassy building to be completed by the turn of the millennium. The U.S. is, coming full-circle and returning to the site of its embassy building during Hitler's Third Reich at Pariser Platz next to the Brandenburg Gate, in the heart of the city. These plans are complemented by the new Foreign Office of the Federal Republic of Germany, which will be erected at the former Schloßplatz opposite the Altes Museum by Karl Friedrich Schinkel.
This project attracted the participation of the John Ruble group of architects Moore Ruble of Santa Monica, CA. Ruble took on the challenge of creating a modern architecture that would complement historic embassy buildings that were Hitler's former Foreign Ministry.
Daily Republican sources in Berlin confirmed that president Bill Clinton's ambassador to Germany, Charles Redman, presented the winning design award to Moore Ruble in a formal ceremony at Amerika Haus Berlin last June. The project is expected to be completed by the year 2001.
The Brandenburg site is of great historical significance. It was the Adolf Hitler's favorite Berlin landmark and served as a backdrop for Nazi seizure of power in the Third Reich, 1933-1945. Brandenburg was also the site of the U.S. Embassy prior to World War II, and the new embassy there will appropriately represent the mission of the United States in a reunified Germany.
In Fresno, CA on Saturday, John Ruble toured downtown. He told reporters the Fresno project "...will be a building with very strong expression, a building that reflects both a national presence and a regional one ... it will be massive in scale."
The final plans have not been completed. However, the Fresno Daily Republican obtained preliminary drawings and watercolors submitted by Moore Ruble to Berlin in 1996.
Sources close to the Berlin architectural selection committee report that Moore Ruble received high German praise for its design proposal with a "civic presence" for the U.S. Chancelry in Berlin, applying complex criteria in an architecture that is "appropriate and timeless." The report stated the U.S. embassy is "...a building that properly reflects the
mission of the United States in Germany, contributes to the rebuilding of Berlin and Pariser Platz, and proudly represents the values and spirit of the American people."
While the funds for the construction of the new Fresno federal courts building are taken from GSA Congressional authorization, the U.S. Berlin embassy construction funds must be derived from the sale of existing U.S. real estate holdings in Berlin and the rest of Germany.
