Günter Behnisch obituary
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