Posts Tagged Germany
Words on the street: Stephen Walter’s city maps
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on February 3, 2011
Kevin Braddock follows artist Stephen Walter as he makes one of his mesmerising maps, this time of Berlin's magic heart
Last October, artist Stephen Walter and I walked from Wedding, Berlin's north-western suburb, to the shores of the Tegeler See, the lake above the airport. This was the third Berlin walk we've done together: Walter takes photos and makes sketches in his notebook while we walk, talk and look. It's research for an artist celebrated for his elaborate, pencil-drawn city maps, densely forested with signs, symbols, place names, cartoons, corporate logos, historical detail, swear words and other, more impressionistic noticings. Mixing diagrammatic subjectivity with cartographic objectivity, Walter's maps couldn't be further from the rigidly informational Ordnance Survey. His mesmerising diagram of London, The Island, featured in the British Library's recent Magnificent Maps exhibition; and now he's on to – deep into – Berlin.
There is a lot of Berlin to discover. In May, we walked the canal system around Kreuzberg. One sweltering July day, we walked up to the disused Allied listening station on top of Teufelsberg. Walter, who is half-German, grew up in London and graduated from the Royal College of Art in 2001. He describes himself as a post-industrial romanticist, and is a lively conversationalist on subjects from art to Chelsea FC.
"There's an inevitability about how mass culture has prevailed," he says. "The big corporations have seeped into my life, and drawing symbols on maps is a way of ekeing something back, using the tools of the northern romantic – an awareness of nature and our tiny part in it."
Walking, he says, is the basis for his method of discovering "epithets of emotions within landscapes". What he records, he takes his back to his studio and meticulously inscribes on to paper with Staedtler Mars Lumograph pencils – tiny visions of place, memory and sensation in a huge aerial view of one man's city.
We walk north through Zeppelin Platz, and the first epithet emerges: "Little Africa", after the exotic streets around Afrikanische Strasse, Kameruner Strasse, Togo Strasse and Sansibar Strasse. A bit further on when we gain Greenwicher Strasse, Liverpooler Strasse and Cambridger Strasse, we seem momentarily to be back in an epithetic Little England. It's tempting to read into Walter's method parallels with land artists such as Richard Long. But the pictorial outcomes are closer to Brueghel's apocalyptic fantasias, depicting "the order of human chaos", as Walter puts it.
In the bleed between cartography and art, Berlin offers something London doesn't have, Walter says. Though London has many layers, the central area has a fixity to it, as if the city is already completed and won't change.
"The beauty of Berlin is that it's a big place and not everything is quantified by estate agents. There are still travellers living on Mariannenplatz [in Kreuzberg] and a Turkish family who grow and sell potatoes on the land. These might not be there forever, so this is a recording of the magic of a changing landscape."
Berlin is regenerating fast, but is also continually resonant with its troubled histories. It has constant capacity for surprise: there are empty, seemingly dispossessed spaces, soft beauty next to extremes of brutalism and decay, and the historic and the futuristic in perplexing conjunctions.
We press on to the Borsigwerke, a huge, disused heavy-industrial zone where Germany's locomotives were once made. Today, a shopping mall, business hotel and multiplex cinema sit aside the sombre, 88-year-old, Gotham-like Borsigturm tower. Then we pass along the shoreside promenade of the Tegeler See. It is dusk now, with the last sunrays glimmering on the water, and there's only a short stroll between us and the U6 metro line home. What remains to be mapped when the artist walks to the water's edge?
"The imagination," Walter says, rolling a cigarette.
Stolid Stuttgart’s citizens give the German city a whiff of Paris in 1968
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on September 8, 2010
Germany's middle classes are out in force to prevent the demolition of Stuttgart's venerable railway terminus
Sybille Adler, a pharmacist, heads for the north wing of Stuttgart station every Monday evening to join the protests against its demolition. Weather permitting, her 84-year-old mother will go along with her; she was born when the station was built. The natural stone building, and with it the park that borders the station's south wing, are Stuttgart's pride and joy.
"This is my native town," said an elegant white-haired woman. On the shoulder strap of her bag she has a "Stuttgart 21" sticker with a red cross, the badge worn by opponents to a project launched by the city's conservative mayor, Wolfgang Schuster. She too, makes a point of joining the protest every Monday, "I'm prepared to throw stones if necessary," she said. "It's an uprising," said another protester.
The protest is mobilising more and more people and has been gathering momentum in the past weeks. Stolid Stuttgart is acquiring the air of Paris in May 1968.
Stuttgart is the capital of Baden-Württemberg, a state that is home to companies such as Mercedes and Porsche, and represents the innovative, prosperous side of Germany, the side that wins contracts in China and the US. Here, engineers feel at home, work is a cardinal virtue, and protest a superfluous, imported product. So when the middle class teams up with ecologists and between 30,000 and 50,000 demonstrators take to the streets, it's a major event in Catholic, conservative southern Germany.
The Stuttgart 21 protest is not minor. For nearly 20 years, the town hall and Deutsche Bahn, the German rail operator, have wanted to convert the city's terminus into a through station to speed up international train lines, notably for the forthcoming Paris-Budapest route, as well as to improve airport access. The project was put to tender in 1997 and the jury selected a bid from Düsseldorf architect Christoph Ingenhoven out of the 190 submitted.
The advantage of this project for the city is that it can recover about 100 hectares of land in the historic centre, enough to build approximately 10,000 new homes and generate between 10,000 and 20,000 lasting jobs. However, it means the construction of 117km of new track and 63km of tunnels.
In July 1999, when the cost was estimated to be around $6.4bn, the then Deutsche Bahn boss put the project on hold. When it was resurrected under his successor, that estimate was revised to $5.8bn. But opponents are certain that it will cost at least twice that. Katharina Ungerer, a teacher, says: "Ten billion [euros]! When you think they can't even afford toilet paper in my kid's school."
Discussions are friendly at the gathering, even though some of those present actually support the project. "You were against the TV tower, against the new trade fair centre, you're just against everything," says one man, setting off a new round of rebuttals: Stuttgart 21 is too expensive, too opaque, will destroy too many trees, it's a major project requiring colossal work.
Opponents are planning the next stage. Since the destruction of the 280 trees in the neighbouring park would mark a defeat, they are organising to protect the trees. On the protest website, sympathisers are invited to choose between three levels of mobilisation. Green represents speaking against the project (19,000 people have committed to that). Orange means showing up whenever people's presence is needed (8,100 volunteers), while red is for those prepared to form a human chain around the trees (1,809 volunteers).
However, this mobilisation comes late in the day. "The European Parliament, the Bundestag, the Bundesrat, the regional parliament and the town hall have all approved this project in recent years." And each time they had a majority of around 75%, according to the mayor.
"Stuttgart 21 is legal but it is no longer democratic," was the answer of Boris Palmer, the Green mayor of nearby Tübingen, who is demanding a referendum.
As to the cost of the estimated outlay, $1.8bn will be paid for by Deutsche Bahn, $1.5bn by the German government and the European Union; $1bn by the state and $257m by the city, which is scarcely more than the share that will be paid by the airport authority.
But the mayor admits that he is having trouble convincing his citizens. According to a recent poll by the local daily paper, Stuttgarter Nachrichten, 63% of locals oppose the project. The Social Democratic Party (SPD) is now also divided on the issue. Just six months away from the regional elections that could mean another defeat for Angela Merkel's party, the SPD does not intend to leave much room for the Greens, who can already claim 20% of votes at national level.
Clearly this has not escaped the attention of the opponents to Stuttgart 21.
This article originally appeared in Le Monde
Günter Behnisch obituary
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on July 19, 2010
Experimental German architect who put his stamp on the Munich Olympics
The German architect Günter Behnisch, who has died aged 88, produced two national monuments – the Munich Olympics of 1972 and the short-lived Bonn parliament of the early 1990s – but the bread and butter of his Stuttgart firm was a long line of humane and progressive social buildings, including schools, colleges and old people's homes, built mainly in south-west Germany. Commissions came mostly through the competition system, and the firm's repeated successes led to Behnisch designs and presentation techniques being imitated across the nation in the 1980s and 90s.
Identifying the Behnisch style is not easy, as the work covered a wide range and changed quickly, but it was always experimental and forward-looking, and never hampered by conscious conformity to a contrived manner. Works such as the University Library, at Eichstätt, notable for its angular, layered planning, and the Hysolar Institute in Stuttgart (both 1987) were dubbed "deconstructivist", but shared little with other deconstructivist work, though the label identifies some cross-cultural threads.
Behnisch himself preferred to speak of Situationsarchitektur, an architecture that responds to place and circumstances, and which focuses attention more on specificities than generalities. He was outspoken about the need for variety and individuality, for clear articulation of building elements and legibility of spaces, for keeping technical disciplines at bay and tolerating accidents and imperfection. All this had a distinguished German ancestry in the work of the alternative, or "organic", modernism of Hans Scharoun and Hugo Häring, whose influence Behnisch acknowledged. The lack of an easily identifiable style also reflects how the firm worked, always with multiple authorship. Behnisch was no "signature architect" and in his later years did not draw, preferring to encourage creativity in others. He employed students fresh from university with their idealism intact, developing their designs through encouragement and criticism and, if necessary, defending them from technical or bureaucratic pressures.
There is nothing unusual in a principal giving design opportunities to younger architects, but inexperience tends to produce naive or mediocre results, not the consistently high standard and extraordinary inventiveness shown by Behnisch's office. He had the knack of guiding developing ideas quickly and a nose for talent. It was in some ways like an academy – and he had experience there, too, holding a chair at Darmstadt University of Technology from 1967. His presence as leader, figurehead and father of the office was crucial. Young architects who came to work for him tended to stay for three or four years before moving on, some starting their own practices. Several leading German practices, including Auer & Weber and Kauffmann Theilig, splintered off from Behnisch.
He was born in Lockwitz near Dresden, and grew up in Chemnitz. His father was a schoolteacher and social democrat. Along with everyone else in his class, Behnisch joined the Hitler Youth. A schoolfriend's relation was a naval officer, so at the outbreak of war, they chose the navy and Behnisch enrolled as a submariner, rising late in the war to the rank of commander – an extraordinary responsibility for a man just into his 20s. When I asked him about the accuracy of the film Das Boot, he commented merely that they had made it too exciting; the reality was mostly boring.
In 1945, he surrendered his submarine in Norway, and was sent to a PoW camp in Northumberland. It was there, under the influence of a former assistant of Paul Schmitthenner, that his interest in architecture was kindled, and he determined to pursue it on his release, studying at Stuttgart from 1947. In that city he remained, working briefly for Rolf Gutbrod, architect of the Liederhalle in Stuttgart, before setting up his own practice in 1952.
The early work was mainly schools, sometimes site-specific and traditional in construction, such as Stuttgart's Vogelsangschule, sometimes more repetitive and construction-dominated such as the Hohenstaufen Gymnasium in Göppingen. The obsession of the period was system-building, and Behnisch began using prefabricated concrete with the firm Rostan, developing a sophisticated system applied to many schools. It was fast, but too repetitive, and less economical than had been hoped. By 1965, he had rejected the whole direction as a blind alley for ceding too much of architecture's potential to the disciplines of construction and failing on the human side.
From then on, the work was more open, playful, informal and increasingly irregular. His big breakthrough was the Munich Olympics. At the height of the Wirtschaftswunder (economic miracle) and under the liberal spirit of 1968, the Federal Republic needed to show a democratic and egalitarian face in contrast with Hitler's monumental Berlin Olympics of 1936. The site, north-west of the city, had been the dump for wartime rubble. Behnisch and his team reshaped it as a landscape, absorbing spectator seating into the slopes and adding an artificial lake. To avoid large boxy halls, tent-like hanging roofs were proposed at an unprecedented scale, Frei Otto being called in as adviser.
Engineering was stretched to new limits and much experimental work had to be done in a limited time, but Behnisch kept his nerve and the Olympics gained its most distinguished modern setting, with an afterlife as a popular park. This work led to many smaller sports buildings through the 1970s and 80s, often associated with the dozens of schools which remained the firm's staple diet. The scale is always humane, natural light ubiquitous, and entrance halls double as assembly and exhibition spaces. The evolution is best seen at Lorch, where three parallel schools date from 1969, 1973 and 2002, respectively polygonal, triangular and circular in plan. There were urban projects, particularly the important but relatively invisible replanning of Stuttgart's Schlossplatz (1973-1980) and the transport interchange at Feuerbach (1992).
Encounters with central urban buildings began with the offices for the charity Diakonisches Werk in 1983. Confined within an inherited masterplan of crushing dullness, it protests its individuality with a courtyard, projecting bays, balconies, sunshades and social rooms. Such an approach was later accepted even by big banks for their HQs, such as the Landesgirokasse in Stuttgart of 1998 and the Norddeutsche Landesbank in Hanover of 2002.
The one Behnisch building we were promised in Britain, a concert hall for Bristol in 1998, "would have been a masterpiece and ... the only public building in England designed and built by a visiting European architect," according to Richard Burton of ABK architects, but it was "cut short by a lack of understanding of its importance and significance". The last major building in which Behnisch had much personal involvement was Berlin's Akademie der Künste on Pariser Platz (completed in 2005) where he had to fight tooth and nail against a conservative planning policy demanding stone facades with regular window holes. He argued that as a public building it should be open and welcoming, and that formal conformity could be obtained in other ways.
In old age he became incapacitated by illness, and gradually handed over the office to his son, Stefan, who has taken it in new directions with an emphasis on sustainability and new work in the US. Behnisch is survived by his wife, Johanna, Stefan and two daughters, Sabine and Charlotte.
• Günter Behnisch, architect, born 12 June 1922; died 12 July 2010
Eyewitness: The headquarters of Deutsche Post AG
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on March 17, 2010
Photographs from the Guardian's Eyewitness series
David Chipperfield: perfect harmony
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on February 4, 2010
Germany woke up to the bold, simple brilliance of David Chipperfield a long time ago. Is Britain finally catching on?
David Chipperfield is standing in the lobby of the Folkwang Museum in Essen. Outside, thousands of people are queuing in snow that is turning to driving sleet. Germans might love their museums, particularly here in the Ruhr valley, but this is some queue. What are they here for? Well, there's the building and its art, of course. But the big draw is also the chance to see a museum that was looted by the Nazis, destroyed by the Allies, awkwardly rebuilt in the 1980s – and now brought back to vigorous, elegant life, by a British architect who has been spending a lot of his time restoring the German skyline.
"Art has no greater enemy than the architect," says the newly knighted Chipperfield, eyeing the queue. This, he adds with a smile, is a quote from the late great art critic David Sylvester. "In recent years, art galleries have tended to become freak shows. It's been all about the wackiness of the buildings and not enough about the art." He points to the Folkwang's serene vista of glazed galleries, gleaming amid all the polished concrete and grey steel, and set around a grid of courtyards. "Here, art comes first: you don't have to walk more than a few steps to find it."
What riles Chipperfield is the ruthless commercialism that has taken over the construction process in recent years, leading to so many banal, cheapskate buildings, especially in Britain, where the aim seems to be to deliver as much covered space as possible on the cheap, rounded off with a headline-stealing roof. It's no coincidence that Chipperfield has produced three of his best new buildings in Germany: the Folkwang; the exquisitely proportioned Museum of Modern Literature, perched on a rock plateau in Marbach, in 2006; and the Neues Museum in Berlin, another building shattered during the war and stunningly restored, which opened last year.
A little Margate magic
Indeed, Chipperfield's knighthood is for his services to architecture both in the UK and in Germany, the latter being, by and large, a country still as committed to high-quality architecture as it is to sturdy cars and gleaming trains. The Folkwang, which houses an impressive art collection, is an emphatically modern building. With its single-storey structure, ceiling-to-floor windows, its horizontal lines, free-flowing plan and painstakingly crafted structure, this is Chipperfield's homage to Mies van der Rohe, the great German modernist whose crystal-clear buildings set a standard for a form of architectural purism that has never been surpassed.
"Britain loves a bargain," says Chipperfield, "but you don't get good, lasting architecture on the cheap. If you look at a building by Mies van der Rohe, it might look very simple, but up close, the sheer quality of construction, materials and thought are inspirational."
Chipperfield's unwillingness to compromise has not always made him friends in Britain, where highly crafted modern buildings are the exception. It is something of myth, however, to say he gets no work here. He is currently working on the Hepworth Wakefield sculpture gallery in Yorkshire; the Turner Contemporary, a shiny, angular structure that promises to light up the Margate skyline; and a major refit for the Royal Academy in London. The Turner, in particular, shows how well Chipperfield is able to adapt his rigorous designs to every environment, even something as cherished and unchanging as an English seaside town. Towering over the waves like a modern fort, the gallery will offer ravishing views of the sea that so inspired the painter.
Such projects have taken some while to come through, though. Chipperfield, born in London in 1953 and trained at the Architectural Association, first made his reputation in Japan in the 1980s. What has made him successful, albeit slowly, is his dedication to quality, ideas, and the craft of building: he teaches architecture as well as practising it, and ran an architectural gallery called 9H, named after the hardest kind of pencil. (It was created to bring wider attention to what were then obscure European firms, such as Herzog and de Meuron.)
Our in-flight magazine culture
Bold yet graceful, full of impact yet devoid of tricks, Chipperfield's architecture could point the way ahead in a new age of austerity, as we move away from the wily architectural excesses of the noughties. It is hard not to see the Folkwang as a reprimand to Chipperfield's home country, especially when the architect warms to his theme. "In Britain, we've tended to replace the kind of architectural culture valued in much of Europe with an in-flight magazine lifestyle – all branding, marketing and 'accessibility', a word that usually means dumbing-down. We treat people, even those willing to trek to museums and art galleries in the snow, as if they don't know anything about anything, when it's just not true.
"We pride ourselves on a system of planning in Britain known as 'development control' – as if we're talking about pest control, rather than ways of making our towns and cities more interesting places. Most architects work in studios largely divorced from academia, as if ideas, criticism and historical research were irrelevant. And we have little or no way of encouraging young architects, who should be winning design competitions for public buildings. We don't have city architects, or local-authority architects' departments, up and down Britain as you do in Europe, so there's no reliable way of encouraging competitions and making them work. It's as if any decent new architecture in Britain happens more by accident than design."
As if to prove his point, Chipperfield, back in his London studio, shows me a website that collates all the new competitions open to architects across Europe. There are many on the continent, few in Britain. Those on the mainland are all marked with an asterisk. What does that mean? "They are design competitions, meaning they want an architect to work all the way through a project; those without just want an architect to produce a set of drawings for planning permission. They can get lost as the development process takes over."
The German press – universally, it appears – likes what Chipperfield has done here. Some 300 German journalists attended last week's opening, and they weren't all from high-minded broadsheets: the building also received lavish attention from the tabloids. "I even won a culture award from Berlin's BZ," says Chipperfield, "which is like the Sun or the Sport handing out prizes for modern architecture."
Folkwang museum unveils Chipperfield redesign
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on January 29, 2010
German museum once dubbed the most beautiful in the world set to welcome back artworks banished by the Nazis
On a visit in 1932, Paul J Sachs, the co-founder of New York's Museum of Modern Art, referred to it as "the most beautiful museum in the world", whose influence stretched way beyond German borders. But then one of Europe's first and finest public collections of contemporary art was declared "degenerate" by the Nazis, the Folkwang was brutally broken up and 1,400 of its works – including Chagalls, Picassos, Matisses, Kirchners and Gauguins – were strewn around the world.
This weekend the museum, in the western German city of Essen, will be returned to its former glory as a temple to modern art with the opening of the British architect David Chipperfield's much-vaunted new glass and concrete space.
The building, say critics, exudes calm. One described it as "resembling a meditation centre", another likened it to "snowflakes in a glass skirt", so weightless does it appear from inside and out compared with much of the Ruhr valley's heavy industrial architecture.
Summing up what he thought important about his design, Chipperfield – who beat other celebrated architects including Zaha Hadid and David Adaye to win the commission – said: "You want to lose yourself in it, as well as being able to orientate yourself."
The Folkwang building, a series of cubes whose windows are made out of recycled glass, reinforces London-born Chipperfield's status in Germany as a darling of modern architecture. It comes hot on the heels of his highly ambitious transformation of Berlin's war-torn Neues Museum.
The Folkwang redesign, which to the Germans' delight was completed on schedule and within budget, will come into its own in March with the opening of the exhibition The Most Beautiful Museum in the World. The show will bring together for the first time in more than 70 years the artworks that were stripped from the gallery's walls by the Nazis in 1936.
Among the returning treasures will be works by Oskar Kokoscha, Wassily Kandinsky and Ernst Ludwig Kirchner. Marc Chagall's vibrant Purimfest, a dusky self-portrait by Giorgio di Chirico, Paul Gauguin's Contes Barbares, as well as Grazing Horses by Franz Marc, currently in the Harvard Art Museum, will hang once again in Essen.
The Folkwang collection – the name derives from Hall of Freyja, the Norse goddess of love and beauty – was first established in 1902 by the cultural philanthropist Karl-Ernst Osthaus, whose vision was to anchor modern art in the centre of urban life. The Folkwang model subsequently inspired many art museums around the world.
The €55m reconstruction was made possible by Berthold Beitz, a philanthropist and former steel baron whose name is inextricably linked with the fortunes of industrial Germany and who initiated his Krupp Foundation to finance the project.
The 96-year old, who greatly plays down his little-known role in saving 800 Jews from the Holocaust by convincing the Nazis they were vital to the war effort, said returning the museum to its former status was his gift to the citizens of Essen. "My only wish had been that I'd be alive to see it, and now my dream has been fulfilled," he said.
Back on the bloc: an architectural tour of East Berlin
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on December 8, 2009
Twenty years after the fall of the wall, young Berliners are finding a new love for GDR architecture, which is being reclaimed for galleries, bars and clubs
Berlin has been melded back together so well over the last two decades that there are now very few obvious visual clues to the division that once was: the shiny "golf ball" TV Tower, the East Side Gallery (the longest remaining stretch of the wall), and the odd scattering of blocky GDR buildings, which defined eastern development in the 1960s when the city was in dire need of reconstruction. Although many of these East German government buildings were knocked down after 1989, and many of those that still stand are ugly, cheap monstrosities, the most iconic remaining examples of this era-defining architecture are now winning the interest of a new generation, thanks in part to the current buzz around the 20th anniversary of the wall coming down. Many young Berliners now think of the GDR era with nostalgia; it's no longer something to forget.
The distinctive buildings – clean and modernist, inspired by Bauhaus or grandly Soviet – which did away with the sharp corners and rectangles of Nazi buildings – have been adopted by businesses, and are now home to many of the city's coolest nightspots, galleries and cafes.
One of the city's most exciting conversions is Soho House Berlin, complete with hotel and pool, which is due to open early next year in the "Big House", the former headquarters of the SED, the Socialist Unity Party. The politics may be gone forever, but the form is back in fashion. Here's where you can see it.
Capitain Petzel
This new gallery, housed in a classic Soviet-modernist glass-box which is flooded with light, was designed in 1964 as a showcase for arts and crafts from across the eastern bloc. The name Capitain Petzel comes from Cologne dealer Gisela Capitain and New York gallerist Friedrich Petzel, who joined together to open this gallery last autumn. It shows a roster of celebrated international artists in a building with a huge wow factor.
• Karl-Marx-Alle 45 (+49 30 2408 8130, capitainpetzel.de).
Club Rechenzentrum
This building used to be the technology centre for East German radio (the name means "computer centre") and is hidden away in the woods on the banks of the Spree. The minimal house and techno club is in a vast single-story rectangular prism, with a frosted glass and wood exterior. In the winter, all the fun is in the vast low-ceilinged main room, but on warm nights there is an adjacent man-made beach – both with celebrated sound systems. As well as dancing, you can chill out on deckchairs by the water, eat from a barbecue and when you're done, rent one of 40 tents in the woods provided by the club and sleep off the excess.
• Nalepastr 10-16 (club-rechenzentrum .de). Entry €8-12, tents €10.
Galerie Im Turm
This "Gallery in Tower" sits in one of the two white Stalinist-style towers flanking Frankfurter Tor, East Berlin's grand square. The towers were once the crowning glory of Karl-Marx-Alle, the monumental socialist boulevard designed by the GDR's star architect Hermann Henselmann, who trained at the Bauhaus but was persuaded by the government to design in the Soviet style. The towers now contain luxury apartments, plus the gallery, which opened in 1965, and used to be a space for official GDR art. Today it supports the work of up-and-coming young artists. Be sure to peek out the windows and marvel at how undeviatingly straight Karl-Marx-Alle is leading to the Fernsehturm (television tower).
• Frankfurtur Tor 1 (+49 30 422 9426, kunstamtkreuzberg.de/k_galerieimturm).
Klub Der Republik
This bar/club takes its name from the Palast der Republik, the GDR's showcase building which was a huge glamorous hall for concerts, parties and events that also housed the East German parliament. The original building was controversially torn down last year but this club, which occupies a former ballroom, scavenged some of the fittings and furniture from the Palast before demolition – from multi-bulb wall lamps to Formica tables. A favourite of Prenzlauer Berg locals, the pre-clubbing ambience is relaxed and the music ranges from electro to pop.
• Pappelallee 81, Berlin 10437 (+49 30 4403 5653. Free entry, but €1 donation to the DJ.
KMA 36
This is a great, unheralded bar that has no signage – but you can see it's a bar as it is housed in a stocky glass cube of a building that was formerly a cosmetics showroom and shop for GDR make-up and hair products. Barely furnished, with an upstairs mezzanine level resplendent in mirrors, on warm nights there are plenty of wooden cinema-style chairs lined up outside for drinking on the wide pavement.
• Karl-Marx-Allee 36. Free entry.
Restaurant Schönbrunn
One of many brilliant outdoor spots to while away a sunny afternoon in Berlin, Restaurant Schönbrunn sits bang in the middle of the Volkspark Friedrichshain with a prime spot by the fountain pond. The building, a low glass-fronted construction with its original sign, was a pavilion in GDR times. While open until late, the best time to visit is during the day when you can take advantage of the large terrace or the beer garden that snakes alongside. The food is waiter-served Bavarian fodder with a twist, such as chicken with beer risotto, or spätzle pasta – or you can just take advantage of the beer selection. Inside, there are retro 60s-style details, including the ball-chair bar stools, and cluster ceiling lights.
Volkspark Friedrichshain (+49 30 453 0565, schoenbrunn-berlin.de).
CSA Bar
A super-stylish cocktail bar that was formerly the ticket office for Czech Airlines, though you can be sure the offices didn't look half as good back then. Now there's a minimalist retro interior – glass panels, low leather seating, sculptural lighting – very James Bond film set. There are myriad cocktails on offer and this is the kind of place you could happily challenge the bar staff and order off menu.
• Karl-Marx-Alle 96 (+49 30 2904 4741, csa-bar.de).
Air Berlin flies from Stansted to Berlin via Dusseldorf from €60 one-way including tax. Ryanair flies Stansted-Berlin direct from £24.99 one way. The new Cosmo boutique hotel in Mitte opens 2 January 2010, from €99 per room per night through designhotels.com.
Jonathan Glancey is dazzled by the Berlin’s newly reborn Neues Museum
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on March 19, 2009
British bombs turned the Neues Museum into a charred wreck. Now British architects have rebuilt it. Jonathan Glancey is dazzled
The exhibits have yet to be installed, and there are no cafes, shops or souvenir stalls. But when Berlin's renovated Neues Museum was thrown open to the public for three magical days this month, some 35,000 people came to wander its seductive parade of echoing, empty rooms.
Although the architecture is thrilling, it was probably sheer curiosity that drew the crowds. After all, the museum has been closed to the public since the second world war, when Allied bombs turned it into a charred ruin. An entire wing had gone. Spectacular spaces such as the Egyptian courtyard had been blasted to smithereens. Meanwhile, the museum's collection - including the prized 3,300-year-old bust of Queen Nefertiti, found in Egypt in 1912 - had long been dispersed for safe-keeping.
Postwar, the Neues Museum found itself in East Germany, which, in its fervour to create a new world, had little interest in the old. Neglected, unloved and lucky not to be bulldozed, it was left as a hulking shell from 1945 to 1986, when some attempts were made to shore up its sorry fabric. It took the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 to get the ball rolling again, with British architect David Chipperfield finally winning the 1997 competition to return it to, or even surpass, its former glory.
The Neues Museum, which once housed a commanding collection of Egyptian and prehistoric art in lavishly decorated galleries, is one of five imposing buildings that constitute Berlin's Museum Island. Designed by Friedrich August Stüler, it was completed in 1855 and intended to house the overspill from the Altes Museum situated across the street.
There were those who argued that the museum should be restored to exactly how it had been. Others wanted a modern whitewashed affair with plenty of neutral gallery space, to help the artworks hold their own against the architecture. Some simply objected to the idea of a British architect working on such an important German building. But the judges were won over by Chipperfield, who brought in another British architect, conservation specialist Julian Harrap, to help him create what can only be described as a piece of architectural sorcery: a beguiling mixture of the restored and the new that should silence most, if not all, of his detractors. Although the Neues Museum doesn't properly open for business until October, with its original collection back in place, the grandeur of a building that only the elderly can remember in its original state has clearly been restored.
Chipperfield reconstructed and renewed the building, while Harrap painstakingly restored murals, frescoes, mosaics, long-lost colour schemes and fine detailing. Where there was nothing left to restore, Chipperfield designed bold new spaces - notably the magnificent central stairwell. And he has cleverly tucked away modern lighting, heating and security essentials into hidden spaces so that Stüler's great promenade of rooms is entirely uninterrupted.
The marriage of old and new is respectful and subtle. Just look at that main stairwell. Retaining walls aside, there was nothing left of it after the war, so Chipperfield allowed himself a free hand, creating a show-stopping space: layers of old brick, render, paintwork and echoes of original frescoes blend into a modern palette of concrete and marble, all topped off with a timber roof. The effect is powerful and painterly. There will be no displays here. It's an enormous breathing space, a ravishing hub visitors will return to again and again as they tour the museum's connecting wings.
Stüler would probably have been pleased Chipperfield got the job. A great admirer of what was then cutting-edge British design and technology, the architect toured Birmingham's ironworks and factories in 1842. He also visited the works of John Soane, the English architect whose Bank of England interiors influenced those of the Neues Museum, where each space is a new surprise. Thrillingly, Stüler's debt to British engineering can still be seen throughout the restored museum. Despite its solemn stone-clad facades, which have been restored almost exactly as they were, the structure abounds in lightweight iron trusses and honeycomb brick and clay vaults, held in place by trim iron beams.
As Chipperfield explains, the Neues Museum had to touch the ground lightly: "One of the reasons it's taken a long while to reconstruct is that the ground beneath it is sodden. A river and a canal flank the entire Museum Island and the Neues Museum was built on thousands of wooden piles. Every bit of weight Stüler could save helped with the construction of a stable building."
Stüler's methods were equally cutting edge. He installed tracks through the galleries so that a train could haul building materials all the way in. He used a steam engine to drive piles into the ground, while a lift, powered by steam, conveyed materials to upper floors. This approach meant the museum's three wings, stretched out over three floors with two courtyards, could be decorated in a profusion of styles.
When the restoration of all five museums on the island is completed in a few years' time, they will be linked by an underground walkway that sets off from a new reception building, also by Chipperfield. This means that the millions of visitors expected at the island will be able to amble through it all en masse, without getting cold or wet. However, taking the subterranean route into the Neues Museum means missing out on a spectacular effect. Enter the building at ground level instead and you find yourself in a tiny, neo-Greek lobby. Pass from there into the huge, daunting stairwell, and the sudden change of scale is exhilarating.
Each gallery leading off this space is a marvel of some sort: rooms inspired by ancient Egyptian, Greek, Roman and Byzantine design. There are square rooms, circular rooms, rooms covered with domes, and one with a Gothic vault. There is even one sporting a brand new brick dome designed by Chipperfield's team. "The most humbling thing about this project," says the architect as we pass from one gallery to another, "has been the extraordinary level of craftsmanship. While I've been thinking of how to make sense of the big new Egyptian gallery, a massive architectural intervention, others have been working with fingertips and cotton buds to perfect the restoration of a fresco. The quality of building skills available to us has been a gift."
It shows throughout the building. Handrails have been carved into the marble stairwells. Fire doors separating galleries are magnificent, floor-to-ceiling oak affairs that look as if they have always been there. Giant windows have been renewed and double-glazed, though you could never tell. Even the marble-lined lavatories are a delight. This is €200m (£184m) well spent. In fact, the project even came in €30m below budget.
The Neues Museum greatly extends the scope of Chipperfield's work. It shows that an unapologetic modernist can take a major historic building and bring fresh life to it without losing the old fabric, its charm and its ghosts. Germany has taken to Chipperfield in a big way over the past decade, allowing him to design ultra-modern commercial buildings as well as memorable cultural institutions, such as the Museum of Modern Literature in Marbach, sited on a rocky plateau above the River Neckar.
Can the curators possibly work to the same high standard? Let's hope so. Mind you, the bust of Nefertiti would attract crowds in their thousands wherever it was sited. However, here in the reborn Neues Museum, even that alluring Egyptian queen will have to try just that bit harder to avoid being upstaged by the glorious gallery that now surrounds her.
• This article was amended on Thursday 19 March 2009. Germany's Museum of Modern Literature, is in Marbach not Marburg, which is further north. This has been corrected.
British architect makes war-damaged Berlin’s cultural heart whole again
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on March 6, 2009
After 60 years of neglect, the Neues Museum is 'woken from its slumber'
It took more than six decades of deliberation and 11 years of painstaking reconstruction but yesterday the last remaining piece in Berlin's neoclassical Museum Island was finally back in place.
A €200m (£178m) project led by British architect David Chipperfield to restore the Neues Museum to its former glory has been hailed as the final building block in the rehabilitation of the historical heart of the city almost 20 years after the fall of the Berlin wall.
Chipperfield, who handed over the keys of the museum to cultural officials yesterday, was saluted in the German press as the most talked about architect of the moment and praised by one critic for having "woken the building from a deep slumber". The quietly spoken 56-year-old Londoner, visibly moved by the moment, summed up his achievement as "trying to pull the remains out of memory and time".
The challenge he faced epitomised the complex task that has confronted the city on countless occasions since it was left as rubble in 1945: how to restore a city haunted by its ruins for decades and divided by the Berlin wall for 30 years. Historians and town planners have agonised over what to do with war ruins such as the Reichstag and the shell of the Gedächtniskirche.
Chipperfield said he saw his job as trying to combine the new and the old into a new whole, whose modern elements were not allowed to "steal the show" from the 19th century original.
"The dominant idea was to hold on to the original material, the remnants from the war damage and the 60 years following," he said. "The real bricks and plaster, the surfaces, the rooms, the real fundament of what survived - that's what we wanted to hold."
The result is a building in which every surface and detail has been considered, in which traces of old colour and raw brick are combined with slim pillars and glass roofs that seem to defy the laws of physics.
He incorporated original elements of the war-damaged building such as plinths, frescoes and pedestals that survived bombing, artillery fire and decades of wind and rain, with modern features including handmade bricks, concrete, white cement mixed with marble chips, and opaque glass. He said the work had been "incredibly complex", and "intellectual and emotional".
The Neues Museum's most elegant feature is Chipperfield's central staircase, a sweeping marble and concrete form that hints at the burnt-out original but is stripped bare of its ornamentation.
The public now has three days to enjoy the empty shell of the new building before it is closed again to allow the exhibits - which were last on display in the museum 70 years ago before being evacuated at the start of the war - to be replaced.
They include Berlin's Egyptian collection, the star attraction of which will be the 3,400-year-old one-eyed, long-necked bust of Queen Nefertiti, who will take her place on a pedestal in the north cupola overlooking a long gallery.
After the war, the East German authorities did their best to repair the badly scarred complex, which now enjoys Unesco heritage status, but never found the funds to restore the Neues Museum. An emergency roof was not added until 1986.
"This ruin was in a way forgotten by history. When we arrived in the 1990s, we were holding fragments of a building that had been untouched for 60 years," Chipperfield said ahead of the opening ceremony.
His ideas were not without controversy, with some critics accusing him of wanting to preserve war ruins rather than honouring the original design by Friedrich August Stüler, which was completed in 1859.
But in repeated interviews he has expressed his delight at being involved in the vigorous intellectual discourse the project inspired, which he hinted was much more robust than anything he had experienced in Britain.
"We didn't agree on everything, but I wouldn't have wanted it any other way," he said. "Germans do like to discuss things a lot. But as architects we always complain that normal people are not interested enough in architecture, so I got my justice here."
Seared sites
Kaiser Wilhelm memorial church
The church was destroyed during a bombing raid in 1943. The surviving belfry was nicknamed the "hollow tooth". Between 1951 and 1961 a new church designed by Egon Eiermann was built next to the site. It is one of Germany's most important war memorials.
The Reichstag
The home of the Bundestag was destroyed by fire in 1933 and reconstructed in 1999 at a cost of around $400m by British architect Sir Norman Foster, who gutted it and placed a huge glass cupola on top in a nod to the original 1894 dome.
The last residence of Kaiser Wilhelm II
Largely destroyed by second world war bombing before East German authorities razed it and replaced it with a People's Palace, it is to be reconstructed in all its Prussian glory at a cost of more than €550m (£490m) by Italian architect Francesco Stella. Work is due to start in 2010.
Kate Connolly
Response: Though I didn’t have his diaries, my biography of Nikolaus Pevsner is still reliable
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on July 27, 2010
My sources are legitimate. I've interviewed those who knew him and accessed his archive
Rosemary Hill must have good judgment as a historian: she has won a prize for her book on Stonehenge and enjoyed praise for her study of Augustus Pugin. But she doesn't give that impression in her review of my new book Pevsner – The Early Life: Germany and Art (The adopted Englishman, Review, 10 July).
She is aware, for example, that in writing this first volume of Sir Nikolaus Pevsner's first-ever biography, I haven't had access to his diaries. She therefore says, vaguely but insidiously, that I "make grave insinuations knowing that much of the evidence is missing". In doing so she makes three "grave insinuations" of her own: that what I've written is suspect; that without the diaries I've been handicapped; and that my knowledge of that handicap should have held me back.
Of course I'd love to have had the diaries, but it's wrong that nothing else matters or that, in Hill's words, only "in the diaries [Pevsner] kept at the time" is there "the evidence that would confirm or refute" conclusions sourced from elsewhere.
It's entirely possible to know about Pevsner from other sources. Mine include the 70 shelf-feet of papers in the Pevsner archive in Los Angeles, the archives of the many bodies he was associated with, a mass of official documents, his own privately circulated family history, and the memories of the people I've talked to who knew him in Germany, including his wife's sister, two first cousins, surviving former students in Göttingen, and contemporaries from his schooldays in Leipzig.
These sources aren't illegitimate or inadequate, as Hill implies. In fact, they often provide an independent means of testing what Pevsner said about himself. If Hill has a basis for discounting them, I'd be the first to make appropriate corrections, but she shouldn't sound alarm bells just because she doesn't like what the best available evidence currently shows.
Equally, it's essential not to borrow what Pevsner did later to explain what he did earlier and in different circumstances. Hill challenges evidence of Pevsner's political attitudes by offering readers a simplistic (and inaccurate) story, often trotted out, about how his behaviour in 1939 (six years after my book closes) proves that he was "simply naive about Nazism" in the early 1930s, adding tritely, "what other explanation is there?" Well, several.
She also makes her unfounded doubt about Pevsner's uncomfortable relations with his father into a giant doubt about the whole project, and minimises, in one grudging sentence, my achievement in "establishing the academic and intellectual context in which, in his twenties, Pevsner's career blossomed", when in fact this is the core of the book.
Hill has fallen back lazily on the very canards my research has challenged, and on the "imminent" appearance of another biography, based on the diaries, in which she has more trust. But that book hasn't appeared yet, and until it does its use as a yardstick for measuring an actual work is speculative and improper. Hill should know better.
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