The Freedom and Unity Monument in front of the Berlin Palace will not be completed by October 3 of this year as planned.
As a spokesman for Minister of State for Culture Claudia Roth announced, the winner of the design competition, the Stuttgart agency Milla & Partner, had delivery problems with the steel shell of the monument.
The design for the “Seesaw”, as the project presented under the title “Citizens on the move” is popularly known, prevailed in a closed procedure in 2010 against 27 competing submissions.
In November 2016, the Budget Committee of the Bundestag surprisingly provided 18.5 million euros for the reconstruction of the colonnades of the former Kaiser Wilhelm National Monument from the German Empire in place of the Unification Monument.
The Bundestag Committee for Culture and Media, in turn, reacted with a technical discussion in January 2017, the majority of the participants of which voted in favor of the draft by Milla & Partner.
A late-night parliamentary vote in June of the same year resulted in a majority for the Citizens on the Move project, with the votes of the governing factions of the grand coalition and the Greens.
The plan is for a shell that can be walked on, fifty meters long and weighing a hundred and fifty tons, which rests on a steel supporting structure.
If there are more than twenty people on one side, the shell will begin to tilt.
Construction began after a suspensive lawsuit by the Berlin Nature Conservation Union in May 2020, and a fixed price of 17 million euros was agreed for the construction costs.
The annual operating and maintenance costs for the property are estimated at around two hundred thousand euros.