FRANKFURT, GERMANY

Frankfurt am Main was, next to Berlin, perhaps Germany’s most important center of
20th-century architectural developments. Its attempts to initiate an era of “New Building”
with innovative social housing programs and extensive public works construction in the
1920s and its impressive post-World War II rebuilding program that culminated with the
creation of a publicly funded “Museum Mile” in the 1980s have given Frankfurt an
architectural prominence that far outweighs its modest size. The building of dozens of
Europe’s tallest skyscrapers has made Frankfurt’s skyline similarly distinctive.
Located on the Main River at the edge of western Germany’s densely populated
Rhein-Main industrial area, Frankfurt is the capital of the German state of Hesse and one
of Europe’s most important banking, commercial, industrial, and transportation centers. It
began the 20th century as a province of Prussia under the guidance of Mayor Franz
Adickes (1846–1915), who initiated a series of reform-minded urban-planning policies.
Before World War I, visitors and professionals from the nascent field of urban planning
flocked to admire Frankfurt’s new streets, boulevards, parks, housing projects, public
transit system, sanitation, and land development schemes. The unique brand of municipal
socialism created by Adickes gave the city government broad powers to create a beautiful
and well-ordered city that planning officials throughout Germany, England, and the
United States envied and sought to copy.
Despite these reforms, Frankfurt, like most other German (indeed European) cities,
suffered a tremendous housing shortage at the end of World War I in 1918. Although
some remedial reforms were implemented immediately after the war, major
improvements did not come until the enactment of the Dawes Plan and the infusion of
American money and loans in 1923 and the election of Social Democrat Ludwig
Landmann as mayor in 1924. Landmann further reorganized the city government and the
tax laws to allow for more efficient planning and construction of housing and public
works and hired the young architect Ernst May from Breslau in Silesia to take control of
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all building and construction departments in the city. Although May did not solve the
housing crisis he inherited, he initiated an unprecedented program of innovative research,
planning, and construction that once again drew the attention and participation of many
of the Europe’s leading architects and planners.
May’s program called for the greater part of the population to live in a series of new
decentralized satellite cities clustered around the old city core, to which they would be
connected with high-speed roads and public transit. Based on older ideas of the Garden
City movement that May had learned as a student of Raymond Unwin in England, the
new housing estates provided high-density low-rise housing for middle-income workers
both in large blocks and in long row houses. Whereas early satellites developments such
as Bruchfeldstrasse (1926–27, E. May), Römerstadt (1927–28, E. May), and Praunheim
(1927–29, E. May) were often laid out with more traditional curved streets and
courtyards, the latter ones, such as Westhausen (1929–30, E. May), Hellerhof (1929, M.
Stam), and Am Lindenbaum (1930, W. Gropius), were laid out in rigid, uniform rows
oriented north to south to maximize the solar orientation of each apartment and allow for
greater standardization of building components.
To realize his ambitious plans, May reorganized the municipal construction industry,
making the process faster, cheaper, and better. Through the help of some national
building research grants (RFG), he rationalized the municipal production of materials and
standardized building components, including the lightweight, prefabricated-concrete
panels that were assembled into cubic, flat-roofed housing. May and his team, including
Grete Schütte-Lihotsky, Martin Elsässer, Adolf Meyer, Emil Kaufmann, and Ferdinand
Kramer, worked hard to define an “existence minimum”—the optimal and most efficient
apartment layout for a given family size. The floor plans, the furnishings, and especially
the “Frankfurt Kitchens” were completely redesigned and mass produced according to
the latest American efficiency theories of C.Frederick, Frederick Taylor, and Henry Ford
in order to minimize costs and work for the housewife. The resulting “New Building”
was, like engineering, striving to be completely objective, rational, and efficient not only
in its construction system but also in its aesthetic and social organization.
The housing program was complemented by an ambitious school-building
program, new libraries, parks and recreation areas, new wholesale markets
and electrical substations, and the implementation of a whole series of
social and cultural reforms to help transform Frankfurt into a more modern
home of the proverbial “New Man.” May publicized Frankfurt’s reforms
in the avant-garde magazine Das neue Frankfur t (The New Frankfurt), which circulated the
innovative ideas to Europe, the United States, Japan, and the rest of the
world. Frankfurt’s successes led the Congrès Internationaux
d’Architecture Moderne (CIAM) holding its second congress in Frankfurt
to inspect, admire, and share May’s achievement of building over 10,000
new apartments in five years. Le Corbusier, Mies van der Rohe, Walter
Gropius, and many other avant-garde architects of the Modern movement
marveled at the new housing, infrastructure,advertising graphics, and schools in the “New Frankfurt” and modeled many new
standards on the Frankfurt prototypes.
In 1930, May and his team of architects left Frankfurt because of increasing pressure
from Germany’s radical right, who labeled May’s modern brand of architecture
“Bolshevik” and unGerman. They went to the Soviet Union, where they had even greater
experimental planning projects. Construction on the “New Frankfurt” continued until
1933, when Hitler’s Nazi regime took over political power of Germany and championed
a more traditional, handcrafted, pitched-roof architecture. Although architectural
development slowed, Frankfurt’s banking, transport, and industrial base made it an
important center for Nazi wartime production. Two of the world’s largest chemical
companies, Hoechst and the former I.G.Farben, makers of the gas used in Nazi
concentration camps, had their headquarters in new buildings in Frankfurt, the former in
a brick Expressionist building by Peter Behrens (1924), the latter in a monumental, stoneclad,
10-story curved building by Hans Poelzig (1931). After World War II, Poelzig’s
office building was used as headquarters for the U.S. Army, and after 1995, it was slowly
converted into university facilities.
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From the fall of 1943 to September 1944 and especially on the night of 22 March
1944, the historic center of Frankfurt was almost completely destroyed by Allied
bombings: of 47,500 buildings, fewer than 8000 survived at least in part. After the war,
expecting to become the headquarters of Allied occupation forces, Frankfurt’s planners
elected to reconstruct their city based primarily on considerations of efficient traffic
arteries and large building lots rather than restoring the original medieval city fabric.
After rubble removal in the late 1940s, rebuilding started in the 1950s alongside West
Germany’s economic recovery. The modern, International Style buildings designed by
May’s colleague Ferdinand Kramer as well as well-known younger architects, such as
Egon Eiermann, Sep Ruf, and Gottfried Böhm, still dominate downtown Frankfurt. With
the relocation of the West German Central Bank to Frankfurt in 1957, the city grew
rapidly into the largest banking and stock exchange center of Germany, the home of one
of Europe’s largest and architecturally significant convention centers, with exhibit halls
by F.V.Thiersch (1907), O.M.Ungers (1984), and Helmut Jahn (1989), and home to
Europe’s largest and busiest train station, one of the busiest airports in the world, and
some of Germany’s busiest Autobahn crossings.
In the late 1970s, citizens began to demand more spending on cultural affairs and the
creation of a more humane cityscape. They voted to restore and reconstruct their war-torn
central Römer Square with its surrounding 16th-century merchants’ houses, using
traditional half-timber framing techniques. The city also began the creation and
construction of a series of worldclass museums, most of which were located on a short
stretch of riverbank across from the downtown in the more traditional Sachsenhausen
neighborhood. Unger’s German Architecture Museum (1984) and Richard Meier’s
Museum of Applied Arts (1985) added on to early 20th-century villas, whereas the
German Postal Museum (1990, G.Behnisch), the Museum of Modern Art (1991,
H.Hollein), and the Schirn Kunsthalle (1985, D.Bangert, B.Jansen, S.Scholz, and
A.Schultes) are completely new structures.
Although the tall banking towers had already earned the city the nicknames
“Bankfurt,” “Mainhattan,” and “Chicago on the Main,” during the final decade of the
century Frankfurt added a whole series of Europe’s tallest and most innovative new
skyscrapers. The trend started with Ungers’ Torhaus (1984) and Jahn’s Messeturm (1991)
at the convention center. On the skyline, the blue-glass twin towers of the Deutsche Bank
(1984) downtown were soon joined by the DG Bank “Crown” tower (1993) by Kohn
Pederson Fox and the Commerzbank Tower (1997) by Sir Norman Foster, which
contains large multistory atriums every eight floors with trees to help condition the
building’s air. Frankfurt’s recent designation as the home of the European Union’s new
central bank has only fueled the construction boom—the Landesbank Hessen is planning
a tower by Peter Schweiger, and German Telekom is planning a skyscraper by Richard
Rogers. The second “New Frankfurt,” created alongside the new museums and banks, has
once again become a fertile ground for architectural innovation and admiration.

EINSTEIN TOWER, POTSDAM,GERMANY

Designed by Erich Mendelsohn, completed 1921
True to modernism’s precepts, the Einstein Tower in Potsdam, Germany, designed and
built by Erich Mendelsohn from 1919 to 1921, is one of the most unique expressions of
avant-garde architecture of the early 20th century.
Born in 1887, Mendelsohn was drawn to architecture at a young age. Like so many
artists and architects at the fin-de-siècle, he believed that a new era was dawning, and that
new forms of architecture were necessary for the modern epoch. In 1913 Mendelsohn met
the astrophysicist Erwin Finlay Freundlich; the two men discovered shared interests and
developed an enduring friendship. Freundlich introduced Mendelsohn to the thenunpublished
radical theory of relativity by Albert Einstein, ideas that would profoundly
influence European intellectual thought, as well as the visual arts, for years to come.
Freundlich; was interested in making observations that would confirm Einstein’s new
theory, and Mendelsohn sought to adapt Einsteinian principals to built forms endowed
with expressive plasticity. Unfortunately, both mens’ plans were interrupted by the
outbreak of World War I. In 1917, Mendelsohn was sent to the Western front.
During the war, Mendelsohn sketched continuously. These small sketches, in ink, of
factories and observatories are remarkable for their abstract forms and stark play of light
and dark. Mendelsohn began creating images of an architecture without reference to
history or style. He indicated in his letters to his wife that these images came to him as
fleeting visions that he labored to jot down before they vanished.
In 1918, Freundlich decided to build his own observatory in Potsdam where he could
explore and apply Einsteinian principles. He immediately sent detailed information to
Mendelsohn on the front. Early studies for the observatory for Freundlich are among
Mendelsohn’s sketches.
Mendelsohn began serious work on the Einstein Tower in May 1920. Construction
began in the summer of 1920; the exterior was completed by October 1921, and the
project was generally finished by 1924. The plan, in keeping with modernist reductivism,
was relatively simple; a vertical shaft was required down which light was reflected into a
horizontal underground observation chamber. The finished building consisted primarily
of a three-story tower supporting an observatory cupola, a ground-floor workroom, a
second-floor room, and the underground observation area.
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However, the appearance of the structure is less like a device for scientific experiment
than like a ship, airplane, or vehicle of transport already in motion across the landscape.
The conceptual program was perhaps more complex than the functional one: Mendelsohn
consciously strove to make a design devoid of right angles, that was molded rather than
built, and that architecturally expressed the dynamic interchange of mass and energy
inherent in Einstein’s theory of relativity. For this reason, he emphasized the interplay of
mass and light, drawing on his impressionistic wartime sketches. The observatory was to
be constructed of poured-in-place concrete, the only material Mendelsohn thought
capable of expressing the dynamic possibilities of the new age. In the end, because of
cost considerations and material wartime shortages, the underground portion was built in
concrete, but the shaft of the tower was constructed of brick with a plaster finish.
The windswept form of the building reflects the conglomeration of a number of ideas
and influences. In part, Mendelsohn’s thinking had been influenced by the German
Expressionist writers and painters, such as Wassily Kandinsky, whose meetings he
attended. Kandinsky’s metaphysical exploration of a new German Zeitgeist shaped by
spiritual rather than rational forces proved particularly influential for Mendelsohn’s
architecture.
The organic vitality of Jugendstil interior design and architecture was equally
influential. Jugendstil (or German Art Nouveau) derived its sinuous and curvilinear
motifs from nature, particularly from vines and trailing plants, which suggested fecundity
and irrationality in their sensuous curving stems. The first-floor plans of the Einstein
Tower seem to be derived from Jugendstil organicism, as seen in the ovoid entry porch,
chrysalis-like stair chamber, and the curvaceous walls of the workroom, all of which
evince references to germination and plantlike growth.
Finally, Mendelsohn’s concern for energy, dynamism, and vitalism led him to the
ideas of the Italian Futurists and their manifestos, particularly to the work of artist
Umberto Boccioni. For example, Boccioni’s sculpture, Unique Forms of Conti nuity in Space, of 1913—a virtual icon of
Futurist ideals of power, movement, and violence—would seem to echo in the sense of
undulating movement that is evoked by the curving walls of Mendelsohn’s Einstein
Tower. In particular, the swept forms of the legs in Boccioni’s soldierlike sculpture find
their way into the surrounds of the Tower’s first-floor windows, suggesting a kind of
protective cowling against movement through some medium, as if the building were
really a vehicle designed for travel.
The Einstein Tower became the most famous, albeit often misunderstood and esoteric,
German building after World War I. Despite the fact that Einstein himself referred to the
building in a private aside to Mendelsohn as organic, the architect’s intentions that the
building formally embody the physicist’s theories was not generally perceived. In his
later work, Mendelsohn continued to explore formal dynamism, but the work was much
more linear and rational, using steel and glass, brick, and concrete slab. He never built
anything like the Einstein Tower again.
The building functioned successfully as an observatory, yet its formal influence on
other architects seems to have been minimal. In this regard, it is a victim of its own
originality and uniqueness. It was a vision, but perhaps not visionary.

DÜSSELDORF, GERMANY

As a German industrial and commercial center in the Prussian Rhine province,
Düsseldorf expanded rapidly in the last quarter of the 19th century, serving as the
banking and trading center for the heavily industrialized Ruhrgebiet (Ruhr Valley) to the east.
Industrialization and continuous development as a trade-fair center shaped the city and its
architecture along the Rhine River. Noteworthy commercial and administrative structures
were built in the first half of the 20th century, but during World War II much of the city
was destroyed by Allied bombing raids. Although some prewar buildings were
undamaged or restored, a great deal of construction in the 1950s and 1960s transformed
the cityscape, with many notable achievements. In 1946, the Allied occupation
designated Düsseldorf the capital of the new state of Northrhine-Westphalia, and, as a
result, prominent new structures associated with state capital status have enhanced the
city’s architectural character.
Düsseldorf has long been a center for art and architectural study. Under the German
Empire, the city had two art institutions: an Academy of Art (Kunstakademie) and a
School for Arts and Crafts (Kunstgewerbeschule). Both offered courses in architecture
and design. The Kunstakademie continues to be a leading center for study. However, the
Kunstgewerbeschule closed in 1918, torn between the reformist and conservative
tendencies of the 20th century. The Kunstgewerbeschule was an important center for
aesthetic reform under Peter Behrens’ directorship (1903–07). A number of innovative
designers were attracted to the school, including Rudolf Bosselt, Fritz Helmuth Ehmcke,
and J.L.M.Lauweriks. Behrens was followed by Wilhelm Kreis, an architect with much
more conservative views. Kreis purged the school of Behrens’ appointees and ultimately
presided over the institution’s dissolution in 1918, an approach to the rivalry between art
academies and schools of applied arts mockingly referred to as the “Düsseldorf solution.”
Kreis continued to teach architecture at the Kunstakademie, where he had held a joint
appointment since 1913. Relatively unknown today, Kreis enjoyed fame and success in a
career spanning four German regimes: the Second Empire, the Weimar Republic, the
Third Reich, and West Germany. Through his teaching and commissions, Kreis strongly
affected Düsseldorf’s s architectural heritage.
Düsseldorf has a wealth of innovative buildings. German architecture between 1900
and 1914 was typified by bourgeois monumentalism, a stylized architecture that melded
Jugendstil (Art Nouveau) with historicism, serving as a bridge between 19th-century
historicism and the 20th-century search for new forms and ideas. One of the most
important Wilhelmine buildings is the Tietz Department Store (now Kaufhof), built in
1907–09 to designs by J.M.Olbrich on a given floor plan. Together with Alfred Messel
and Wilhelm Kreis, Olbrich was one of the most influential architects of German
department stores. Olbrich used the colonnade and shop window front made famous by
Messel’s Wertheim store but added new sculptural interest to the roofline. Buttresses and
columns covering the steel frame served to unify the monumental exterior. Olbrich’s
four-part windows, running the height of the building, became a basic motif of German
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department stores. The interiors and light courts were not restored after World War II
destruction.
Despite teaching for years in Düsseldorf, Peter Behrens designed only one building
there, the Mannesmann Building; it was built in 1911–12 after he left the city. Here,
Behrens sought to combine his interest in innovative design with the need for display
inherent in a corporate headquarters. Behrens’ building was inspired by Italian palazzi. On a
steel frame, he used rusticated stone for the foundation, dressed stone for the upper
levels, and a steeply pitched roof. The fenestration, geometric harmony, and horizontal
emphasis are typical of Behrens’ classical tendencies and were widely imitated. The
interior incorporated innovative engineering based on a system of pillars using a normal
module that allowed organizational flexibility. The module was a “normal office”: a sixperson
desk with heater and office furniture. Even in the executive offices, all office
walls were movable partitions. The free treatment of the interior and the exterior
emphasis on blocky, objective forms were design landmarks in German corporate
architecture.
Poured-concrete construction and innovative brick Expressionist
architecture dominated the interwar period. Düsseldorf also became home
to Germany’s first skyscraper, the Wilhelm Marx House (1922–24) by
Kreis. The building included a stock exchange, shops, and administrative
offices. Concrete and elaborate brick designs alternate on the exterior,
culminating in geometric brick tracery crowning the tower and lending a
distinctive silhouette to the building. Another brick Expressionist building,
the Stumm Concern Headquarters (1922–24), was the work of Paul
Bonatz, the architect of Stuttgart’s Central Train Station.
The Stumm building drew on American examples to create a concrete frame decoratively
clad in bricks.
The most important interwar project was the Ehrenhof (1925–26), a group of buildings
designed by Wilhelm Kreis as part of the “GESOLEI” (Gesundheits pfl ege, soziale Fürs orge und Leibesübungen) exposition, an event
combining elements of design show, amusement park, trade fair, and education fair. The
Ehrenhof itself was a group of four stylistically unified permanent buildings arranged
around a plaza: Planetarium (a multipurpose meeting hall), Economics Museum, Art
Museum, and Rhine Restaurant. The complex was intended to combine contemporary
architecture, sculpture, and landscaping ideas in an urban plaza that would serve as a
cultural center for social interaction and give closure and balance to the Rhinefront as
part of the city plan. On the whole, the Ehrenhof exemplifies Weimar design at its best
but also presages the monumental classicism of the 1930s (particularly during the Third
Reich) at which Kreis excelled. Flat roofs and horizontal lines dominate the museum
buildings, where stone foundations contrast with decorative use of brick and sculpture.
The Planetarium is a striking, circular building with brick arcades and a low dome
reminiscent of Near Eastern forms. Gutted by fire in World War II, the Planetarium was
restored in the 1970s as a concert hall.
Postwar Düsseldorf became a center for innovative architecture, and recent
developments sealed Düsseldorf’s s reputation as an architectural mecca. In 1960,
Düsseldorf received a new symbol in the Thyssen Tower, popularly known as the
“Dreischeibenhaus” (Three-Slab House), built in 1957–60 to designs by the firm Helmuth
Hentrich and Hubert Petschnigg. The nickname refers to its geometric conception as
three tall, narrow slabs. At a height of 95 meters with 25 floors, its steel-frame and glass/
aluminum-curtain-wall construction was a milestone for German corporate architecture.
Although its height and starkness were controversial, the tower was celebrated as an
emblem of German economic recovery.
Another subject of debate as a symbol was the State Parliament (Landtag),
completed in 1988 following a 1979 competition won by the firm of Eller,
Maier, Moser, Walter and Partner. The parliament features a circular
plenary hall surrounded by two multilevel wings and an interplay of
convex and concave rounded forms intended to symbolize the complex but
open nature of democracy. Nonetheless, the building’s monumentality has
been criticized for embodying a sort of economic hubris. Although a state
parliament, the building is larger and more imposing than the Federal
Parliament built in Bonn in the same era.
Düsseldorf continues to be a center for arts innovation. Museum Insel Hombroich is
an art environment, an innovative approach to museum conception located on an island
15 kilometers south of Düsseldorf in Neuss. The complex was begun in 1982 by Karl-
Heinrich Müller, a real estate tycoon, and has been open to the public since 1986. There
is no single museum building. Instead, the island is conceived as a space for art in a
landscape shaped by Bernhard Korte. An art collection is housed in pavilions, or “walk-in
sculptures,” designed by Erwin Heerich. By 1997, there were 11 pavilions in a large park.
The concept behind the complex was to blend art and nature and to juxtapose ancient
Chinese, Persian, and Khmer art with contemporary works, allowing their merits to speak
to the viewer directly, without any signs or labels to identify the artworks. Heerich’s
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pavilions also include ateliers and studios for artists in residence. The collection includes
work ranging from Rembrandt through Matisse to Alexander Calder.
The redevelopment of Düsseldorf’s s Rhinefront in the 1990s has also recently
attracted critical attention. Between 1993 and 1995, a major thoroughfare along the Rhine
River was rerouted into a tunnel. The goal was to reincorporate the river into the life of
the city by making space for terraces, parks, and cafes above the tunnel. The resulting
Rhine Promenade has been critically admired and popularly successful. The Promenade
combines paths with seating spaces and pools running roughly north to south from the
State Parliament to the Ehrenhof.
In a second project, the Rhine Harbor is being redeveloped to transform most of the
harbor area into office spaces, especially for multimedia firms. The “Media Harbor,” or
“Creative Mile,” combines retention of the 1896 harbor as a technological landmark with
experimental architecture by international leading architects, including Frank O.Gehry,
Steven Holl, David Chip perfield, and many others. It is frequently described as a
permanent architecture exhibit. In particular, Gehry’s Neue Zollhof office tower complex
(1999) broke new ground by making deconstructionist architecture potentially
economical. Gehry’s free-form shapes were adapted to mass-production methods via
computer simulation and poured forms in order to meet the builder’s engineering
demands. The harbor project promises to attract attention for several years to come.

DARMSTADT, GERMANY

The Darmstadt artists’ colony was founded in West Germany in 1899 by Grand Duke
Ernst Ludwig von Hessen of Darmstadt, grandson of Queen Victoria and the last ruler of
the formerly independent state, which became part of the German Empire in 1871. Ernst
Ludwig was one of the most influential of the new patrons of contemporary architecture
and design movements in the early 20th century. He was familiar with the English Arts
and Crafts movement because of his frequent trips to England and his having already
commissioned Baillie Scott in 1897 to design furniture and interior decorations for the
dining and drawing rooms of his palace at Darmstadt. C.R.Ashbee was invited to design
the light fittings, and his Guild and School of Handicraft in London was asked to make
both furniture and fittings. The colony was a response to a memorandum prepared for the
parliament and important local people by Alexander Kock, proprietor of a local wallpaper
factory. He and others acknowledged the important role that the applied arts might play
in future economic development. Aware of English developments, the memorandum
included ideas for the development of homes for artists and ateliers for applied art. Seven
artists were invited to form the colony on the Matildehöhe, and they were to design and
direct the production of goods by other craftspeople and workshops. The outcomes were
published and promoted by Kock through his journals, Zeits chrift fü r Innendeko ration and Deutsche Kunst und Decoration, the latter a German
imitation of the English The Studio. Twenty-three artists worked there at various times from 1899
to 1914, when the venture ceased.
Parklike grounds (already containing a reservoir), the Russian Chapel, and a number
of villas were offered by Ernst Ludwig. The colony was to be a “living and working
world” and to form a public exhibition, Ein Dokument Deuts cher Kunst (A Document of German Art), to be held in
1901. The intention was to show the public a model style of home decoration in
individually designed artists’ houses. The artists—Hans Christiansen, Paul Bürck, Patriz
Huber, Josef Olbrich, Peter Behrens, Ludwig Habich, and Rudolf Bosselt—were given a
three-year contract and a housing subsidy, although they had to pay construction costs
themselves. Work started immediately, and the resulting villa suburb formed the main
part of the exhibition, creating an event in the field of architecture and interior decoration
that bore witness both to the individuality of the members and to the collective strength
of the colony. Olbrich organized the layout of the exhibition in 1901, designing most of
the buildings himself. Architecture included not only Olbrich’s Ernst-Ludwig-Haus, the
artistic center, and a theater but also various temporary structures and the artists’ houses
themselves. Writings of the artists reveal that they were concerned with aesthetic rather
Entries A–F 651
than functional considerations. No reference is made to machinery, mass production, or
cost-effectiveness in projects undertaken by the colony. In one of three articles on the
Darmstadt colony by W. Fred in The Studio, Behrens gave a cogent analysis of the aims of the Arts
and Crafts in Germany: “Architecture is the art of building, and comprises in its name
two ideas: the mastery of the practical and the art of the beautiful. There is always
something exhilarating in being able to combine in one word the two ideas—that of
practical utility and that of abstract beauty—which unfortunately have too often been
opposed to each other.” The architecture and design at the colony showed progressive
unification of the practical and the beautiful, going beyond the possibilities of artistic
hand production to the wider field of industry.
Built on a gradient, the two-story Ernst-Ludwig-Haus, a long, low, shedlike design
with unbroken walls, dominates the other buildings. Its principal feature is the omegashaped
central doorway, with richly painted and gilded stucco decoration, flanked by
Ludwig Habich’s colossal statues of Adam and Eve. The two bronze figures in the door
niches, goddesses of victory by Bosselt, harmonize well with Olbrich’s gold decoration
behind them. Internally, the upper story contained a central hall, intended for small
exhibitions. To the right and left, several colonists had two rooms each, placed one
behind the other, to provide useful, well-lit spaces. The lower story contained living
rooms for the bachelors along with the general fencing, gymnastic, and recreational
rooms.
Grouped around the atelier were the private houses, which adhere to two basic types:
(1) a narrow design with large, pitched roofs and irregularly placed windows with small
panes, derived largely from English Domestic Revival work, and (2) those with flat,
veranda-like roofs, developed by Wagner and Hoffmann, that echo the simplicity of the
Italian villa. The Villa Habich is reminiscent of Hoffmann’s Villa Henneberg (1900) near
Vienna, with its emphasis on the square block of the house with larger windows, sudden
projection, and a flat roof extending far out over the walls. The Glückert II house is a
compromise between the two types.
The exterior and interior decoration witness the diversity and richness of Olbrich’s
vocabulary, in which he repeats linear border patterns and mold forms derived from
nature into stucco and plaster. All his designs provide interesting color harmonies and
demonstrate a simplification of form, tending toward geometry, but all bear the hallmark
of quality, craftsmanship, and respect for materials. The first story of Olbrich’s own
house had glazed tiles on the facade.
Behrens designed his own small villa, employing a compact plan. The exterior shows
the free interpretation of vernacular forms combined with an attempt at structural
rationalism that contrasts with the picturesqueness of Olbrich. He employed brick and
green terra-cotta tiles to invoke the vernacular of the Baltics, which he admired.
Internally, curvilinear echoes of Art Nouveau are outweighed by simplified forms that are
more in accordance with contemporary Viennese trends. The pavement running between
the artists’ houses is designed in a black-and-white linear geometric pattern, formed out
of small flat cobbles and serving to unite the individually designed villas.
The exhibition of 1901 was a financial failure, and the critical reception was mixed,
although it was recognized as an important point in the development of German design.
A less ambitious exhibition followed in 1904, responding to the criticism that objects
were too expensive and sometimes “eccentric.” Olbrich created a “group of three houses”
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representing average homes. Here, modest shapes, simple motifs, and plainer materials
recalled vernacular work.
The colony was represented at the Paris Exhibition of 1900, at Turin in 1902, and at
St. Louis in 1904. In 1907, Olbrich designed the Hochzeitsturm (Wedding Tower) and
the Municipal Exhibition Halls as the crowning feature of the Mathildenhöhe site. The
motif of a five-fingered hand raised in benediction, with its asymmetrically placed
banded windows running around the corners, is thought to have influenced Gropius’
design for the Chicago Tribune Tower competition entry of 1922. Architects such as
Behrens demonstrated their talents in designing architecture, furniture, silver, jewelry,
glass, and porcelain. Behrens left the colony in 1903 and, as was the case of many others
who had begun their careers at Darmstadt, enjoyed national and international acclaim.
A final exhibition was organized at Darmstadt in 1914. Albin Müller, who took over
the artistic management after Olbrich’s death, designed new buildings and facilities
specifically for this purpose. These were destroyed in 1944.

COLOGNE, GERMANY

With the Rhine River winding slowly through the city and its towering cathedral spires,
Cologne has long provided the German imagination with rich images of artistic and
national Romanticism. Its idyllic landscape and key location on a major waterway have
supported the city’s evolution as an important commercial and industrial center. The
Entries A–F 523
history of Cologne’s architectural developments in the 20th century clearly joins the two
strands of artistic enchantment and dynamic economy.
The city’s built landscape served a distinct defensive function at the close of the 19th
century. Developments in military technology had brought about an increased target
range of weapons, and Cologne’s medieval city wall with its buffer zone leading up to
fortification structures was insufficient to protect Cologne from enemy fire. In 1881 the
Prussian government moved the inner medieval fortress ring outward, and the
approximately one-square-mile, crescent-shaped area created by the relocation of the
wall, Neustadt, was then quickly constructed. No longer cramped behind the 600-year-old
city wall, Cologne’s turn-of-the-century population of over 400,000 had room to continue
its process of growth and urbanization. In 1907–14 the defensive structures underwent
further alterations. The fortification numbered 182 units on the eve of World War I, and
almost all these were subsequently torn down per the Treaty of Versailles, putting an end
to Cologne’s military and architectural status as a”fortress city.” Konrad Adenauer,
Cologne’s lord mayor from 1917 to 1933, successfully convinced the Allies to allow a
handful of the fortresses to remain as historical documents.
As modern military technology changed the location and layout of the city, suburbs
dominated by factories began to crop up around the outskirts of the city. The population
continued to grow, helped along by a pattern of incorporating communities, extending the
geographic contours of the city eastward across the river. The industrialization and
commercialization of Cologne brought about construction projects that facilitated the
transportation of goods and people throughout the city. The construction of the Deutzer
Bridge (1911–13) united both sides of the Rhine, and the widening and merger of
existing alleys into the Gürzenichstrasse created a modern access road to the bridge on
the east side of the river.
The construction of major department stores such as Kaufhaus Tietz (designed by
Wilhelm Kreis, 1912–14) supported the trend toward urbanization. The Kaufhaus Tietz
building, situated between Hohe Strasse and Gürzenichstrasse, represented a new
architectural form with its symmetrical, imposing form and three glass-covered
courtyards. In 1933 the Tietz firm was one of the first victims of the National Socialists’
policy of “Aryanization.” The Jewish family Tietz lost their position as head of the
company, and the firm was renamed Westdeutsche Kaufhof AG.Allied bombing
damaged the interior and the foundation of the building. In 1953 the firm was renamed
once again, acquiring the simpler title Kaufhof Aktiengesellschaft, which it retains today.
Such monumental architecture reflected Rhineland architects’ belief that they could
affect the world with their constructions, and this conviction led to buildings that were
assigned a pedagogical and therapeutic role by their designers. In 1914 Bruno Taut
constructed one of the first Expressionist buildings with his polygonal Glaspalast (the
glass palace) for the Werk-bund Exhibition in Cologne, which took place on what are
now the trade-show grounds. Under the pavilion’s cupola, made up of diamond-shaped
glass bricks, a band of six short rhymes by Paul Scheerbart celebrated the potential for
architecture to improve society. Focusing primarily on glass and light, these included “Das bunte Glas /zers tört den Hass ”
(Colored glass/destroys hate) and “Das Glas bringt uns die neue Zeit/Backs teinkultur tut uns nu r leid” (Glass brings the new era to us/Brick culture
only pains us). The building, which has not survived, and the exhibition firmly
established Cologne as a major figure on the international and national architecture
stages.
Encyclopedia of 20th-century architecture 524
Under Konrad Adenauer the city saw a number of new designs in the
interwar period, from Rhine Romantic to international modern, but all
with a decidedly German reference. Although the war had suffocated an
explicitly Expressionist architectural movement, the prewar Utopian
vision of beauty, light, and glass continued to influence construction plans,
particularly with reference to the emerging social interest in hygiene and
sports and the growing population. Before the war Cologne’s population
numbered almost 600,000 inhabitants. By the mid-1920s this number rose
to over 700,000. With the elimination of the fortress structures, city
planners were free to push Cologne’s

Maria Konigein, Cologne-Marienburg,
Germany, designed by Dominikus
Böhm (1954)
borders out further again, onto land that had once been reserved for defense purposes.
The need for increased work and recreation spaces, combined with Expressionist
influences and interwar local patriotism, brought about an explosion of new constructions
in all sectors.
Inspired by the parks in the city of Düsseldorf, Adenauer created the greenbelts or
rings encircling Cologne (1921–24). These areas consisted of a seven-kilometer-long
inner ring and a 30-kilometer-long outer green ring that followed the fortification lines
and incorporated the remaining forts in their landscape. Designed in part by the Hamburg
architect and city planner Fritz Schumacher, the belts were part of the designs for
Cologne that envisioned a unity of living, working, relaxation, and transportation. This
connection between mind and body, accompanied an increased enthusiasm for sports as
well, was symbolized by the stadium and swimming facility constructed by Adolf Abel in
1926, city planner from 1925 to 1930. Two monumental, matching buildings flanked the
sport center’s entrance, flat-roofed, with straight, imposing lines and massive brick
pillars.
A further remnant of Fortress Cologne found a use for the construction of the Bastei
restaurant (1923–24) by Wilhelm Riphahn, reconstructed by him in 1958 after it had been
badly burned during World War II. Built on an abandoned structure of the fortress wall,
the defensive tower houses three administrative and storage levels, and the kitchen is in a
corner of the top floor, overlooking the street. The dining area projects over the river, a
glass-paneled half circle like a Ferris wheel turned on its side and framed with steel
struts, topped with a star-shaped flat roof and encircled by a terrace. The Expressionist
reference to glass and jagged forms is unmistakable, but the Bastei also showed elements
of an emerging functionalism, such as using glass to increase the view of the river. This
peculiar interwar combination of Expressionism, functionalism, and local patriotism can
also be seen in Riphahn and Caspar Maria Grod’s Kölnsiche Zeitung, a newspaper
building shaped like a ship’s bow that alludes to the Rhine.
Ideas about light and green spaces extended to the new residential areas, and many of
these constructions are exemplary of Cologne’s Neues Bauen (New Building) movement.
Riphahn and Grod’s Blauer Hof estate (1926–28) in the Buchforst district, unusual for its
block structure, provided residents with light, air, trees, and green courtyards. The
architects designed the apartments of the neighboring estate, Weisse Stadt, at a slant to
provide optimum lighting; its row-by-row layout of units became quite popular for
housing. Their residential area Zoll-stock Siedling (1927–29) comprised apartments
designed to reflect the shared economic and social status of the middle-class civil
servants and private-sector residents. Each unit included a separate kitchenette instead of
the combined kitchen and living area typical for the region, thereby demonstrating the
residents’ higher social status. The Melanchthon church (1929–30) there, designed by
Theodor Merrill, intentionally provided Zollstock with a social center. The church
sustained damage during the war and has been restored with some alterations.
Commercial buildings reemerged in the interwar period as important constructions.
Jacob Koerfer’s L-shaped Hansa-Hochhaus (1924–25), comprising a long, seven-story
unit and a 17-story tower, presented a trend toward horizontal forms. Nevertheless, at
more than 213 feet, it was briefly the tallest building in Europe. With its alternating rows
of glass and limestone, the Dischhaus (1928–30), designed by Bruno Paul, represented a
clearer modern emphasis on smooth, vertical, flowing lines. Destroyed in World War II,
Encyclopedia of 20th-century architecture 526
it has been rebuilt according to the original plans. The completion of the autobahn
between Cologne and Bonn in 1932 offered infrastructural transportation support to these
commercial projects.
The National Socialists’ seizure of power in 1933 brought about a cleansing of the
Martinsviertel quarter, a project actually developed under Adenauer to combat the
poverty and crime rampant in that part of the city. The Nazis chased “undesirables” out of
the area and expropriated great numbers of buildings from Jews. Architects fused old and
new buildings together, creating a changed topography that evoked an idealistic image of
a German medieval inner city. Nazi planners envisioned the inner city as a visual
reference to the party’s claims of a German heritage, whereas the surrounding modern
city, with its monumental parade alleys, contributed to a sense of historical evolution.
World War II bombing almost entirely destroyed Cologne. The historic inner city lost
90 percent of its buildings, and urban areas saw irreparable damage to 70 percent of
residences. The cathedral, although still standing, was badly damaged, as were many
Romanesque churches. Only 40,000 people of the prewar 800,000 population continued
to live in Cologne. The “Adolf Hitler Mountain,” as locals referred to the overwhelming
pile of rubble left by the destruction in the center of the city, disappeared only slowly
over the years until 1955. Planners ripped down many 19th-century buildings in the
postwar years, electing to reconstruct a number of the 1930s buildings in the massive
neoclassical style of Nazism.
The postwar years focused on reclaiming Cologne’s architectural past. In 1948
residents celebrated the 700th anniversary of the cathedral. In 1956 repairs to the building
had been completed, allowing visitors once again full access to the city’s icon.
Dominikus Böhm and his son Gottfried continued the elder’s interwar program of
constructing new churches, using new materials such as concrete and circular styles that
reflected changes in the function of the church as a center of community life. Dominikus
Böhm had built the tower of his St. Engelbert Church (1930) standing apart from the
main building, keeping the form of the main building as reflective of its purpose to unify
the congregation. St. Maria Königin (1952–54), also designed by Dominikus Böhm, uses
a south-facing picture window as the primary source of light, and its baptistery is entirely
glass. Gottfried Böhm constructed the tower in 1960. The combination of round forms
and straight lines in brick and concrete used in Dominikus Böhm’s Christi Auferstehung
Church (1968) provides an example of the plasticity typical of the Brutalism movement,
evident as well in the architect Oswald Matthias Ungers’s own private home and office
(1958–59). The library annex in 1989 used almost exclusively cubes and squares and
acquired an explicit humanistic, pedagogical function.
The architectural competition for the Wallraf-Richartz Museum in 1978 demonstrated
the importance that discussions surrounding architectural projects have had in Cologne.
Although neither James Stirling’s Postmodern design for the museum nor Ungers’s plan,
which called for the museum building itself to open up new spaces in the city, was
realized, both contributed to a new era of architecture in Cologne and Germany. The
winning plan, by Peter Busman and Godfrid Haberer (1980–86), a reinforced-concrete
structure with overhanging red brick walls, housed the Wallraf-Richartz, the Ludwig
Museum, and the Philharmonic. Ungers later won a competition for the new Wallraf-
Richartz Museum, which once again reflected his preference for cube forms. The
museum opened for exhibits in January 2001 to critical acclaim for the architectural
Entries A–F 527
design as well as the display of the museum’s holdings, successfully helping Cologne in
its struggle to edge out Berlin as Germany’s leading cultural city.
The end of the 20th century demonstrated the “cathedral city’s” commitment to
preserving its cultural heritage while looking forward architecturally. The ruins left by
the war of the Church of St. Kolumba will be incorporated into a new building for the
relocated diocesan museum of Cologne, a competition won by Peter Zumthor in 1997.
The following year marked the 750th anniversary of the cathedral and a new series of
reconstructions for that building. As restorers voice concern over the damage effected by
pollution to the flying buttresses, the cathedral remains a looming reminder of the
evolving role of the city’s artistic and commercial past in the construction of its built
landscape.

BERLIN, GERMANY

Reciprocal reasons justify historians emphasizing the modern era when studying Berlin’s
architectural history: the sheer amount built and the sheer amount destroyed. Unique
among European capitals, Berlin exemplifies both formative dynamism and annihilative
zest. Between the German unification and reunification (1871–1991), razing spoke as
much as raising—and each still speaks today.
In 1800 Berlin was still a moderate, regional city. Centuries of accommodating the
Hohenzollern and their baroque and neo-classical edifices (by Schülters and Schinkel,
respectively) added dignity, not development. However, by 1900, Berlin emerged a
continental parvenu—an empire seat whose aggregate population had multiplied 15 times
(from 170,000 to 2.7 million), making it Europe’s third-ranked metropolis and possibly
the most densely inhabited. Heavy industry and railway centraliza tion induced
immigration, necessitating rapid, blanketing, polycentric growth. Mietskas ernen (rental barracks)
distended outward from the historical kernel on vast blocks. These massive tenements
(sometimes of six stories and five communicating courtyards) housed 90 percent of
Berliners. Urbanist Werner Hegemann decried this human warehousing. Uncontrolled
speculation overran planning; fervid rebuilding followed demolition. Metropolitan Berlin
became an amnesic place. A newly emerging citizen, the blasé flâneur, roamed bustling streets;
sociologists (Franz Hessel and Georg Simmel) were fascinated and repelled. The only
parallel to Berlin’s demographic and economic dynamism was Chicago—a comparison
Mark Twain made. Historical Berlin’s attrition, of course, ultimately resulted from more
than this recycling. The only parallel in warfare, ruination, and division was, ironically,
Jerusalem—a comparison Harry Truman made.
Berlin’s “tradition of no traditions” spawned the 20th century’s preeminent
architectural avant-garde. There was so much to build and so few precedents. While the
19th century’s dawning brought Berlin Schinkel’s brilliance, its ending offered no
comparison. Wilhelmine architecture (1888–1918), named for Germany’s last Kaiser,
Wilhelm II, was an unsteady, eclectic transplant. Wallot’s bombastic Reichstag (1884–
94) and Kark and Raschdorff’s s grandiose Cathedral (1894–1905) were much criticized.
Jugendstil barely touched Berlin despite Henry van de Velde’s brief stay. Bland, stuccoed
brick boxes defined the city. Hints toward a purposefully “reductive” architecture existed,
such as Alfred Messel’s Wertheim Department Store (1904). Radicalism flourished
unchallenged within Berlin’s aesthetic neutrality. World War I reinforced this. Although
many nations were startled into modernity by mechanized war, Germany (like another
Entries A–F 251
subsequent architectural avant-garde center, Russia) abandoned its conservative political
and social institutions through abandoning its monarchy.
Heavy industry’s futurism imprinted Berlin’s architecture. Berlin rode the industrial
revolution’s second wave, a half century after England’s first push. Berlin meant not
spinning mills but combustion engines, electricity, and intraurban transportation. The
world’s first electric trolley originated here (1881). In this utilitarian Fabriks tadt (factory city),
functionalism was the natural order. To prosper, new building tasks—the industrial elite’s
manufacturing facilities, the consumer bourgeoisie’s department stores and offices, and
the proletariat’s mass housing—needed solutions. Berlin’s technological ascendancy
paralleled the rise of steel, glass, and reinforced concrete. A city still becoming, not
being, Berlin liberally explored these new typologies and materials.
Berlin’s 20th-century architectural pageant was not just prescient but stylistically
comprehensive. Berlin respected “orthodox” modernism’s mode (Bauhaus
rationalism/functionalism) but also cherished modernism’s “other” mode
(organicism/keneticism). Only 20th-century Helsinki—through Alvar Aalto—could
compare in dedication to naturalistic automatism. Berlin bred strident variants of both the
“orthodox” and “other” modes: die neue Sachlichkeit (the New Objectivity) and Expressionism.
Collaborative groups offered solidarity among cacophony. Although Germany overall
excelled at this (as the Deutsche Werkbund’s Munich 1907 founding shows), Berlin after
World War I particularly fostered associations: Walter Gropius’s “Arbeitsrat für Kunst”
(1918, later fused with the propagandist “Novembergruppe”); Hugo Häring and Mies van
der Rohe’s antiestablishment “Der Ring” (1924); and Bruno Taut, Paul Scheerbart, and
Hans Scharoun’s Gläserne Kette (Glass Chain, 1919–20)—this last an Utopian euphoria
dedicated to crystalline mountain forms. Peter Behrens, Erich Mendelsohn, Hans Poelzig,
and Ludwig Hilberseimer plied these circles. Berlin’s commitment to competitions also
fostered diversity (continuing into today). Paper architecture thrived. Vying visionary
alternatives brought everything before the public. Architecture’s exuberance paralleled
Berlin’s arts—the Dada montagists’ nihilism, the German Expressionist painters’
ferocious hues, Fritz Lang’s metropolitan expose films, and Bertolt Brecht’s theater of
critical verity.
Straddling World War I, two successive architectural revolutions swept
Berlin. First came Behrens’s reification of the industrial “idea.” His AEG
Turbine Factory (1908–09) created an unexpectedly monumental temple
celebrating mass production. Behrens’s atelier (where Gropius and Mies
schooled) transformed Berlin-Moabit into the world’s most technical and
representational industrialized district. Berlin became symbolic: no mere
metropolis but an “electropolis.”

Neue Nationalgalerie, detail (New
National Gallery), designed by Mies
van der Rohe (1962–68)

The second revolution, after the war,
posited and probed the aesthetic binary of Neue Sachlichkeit versus Expressionism—a
stylistic controversy embroiling Mendelsohn, Poelzig, Mies, and others, with Gropius contributing from the
Bauhaus. During the Weimar Republic, Berlin focused Europe’s avant-garde
architectural debate. The volumetric clarity and dryly “objective” tectonic of Mies’s
Concrete Office proposal (1922–23) countered against the organic complexity of
Poelzig’s Grosses Schauspielhaus (1919) and Mendelsohn’s Einstein Tower (1920–24) in
Potsdam. Yet positions fluctuated. Mendelsohn, although inspired by relativity’s
indeterminacy at Potsdam, celebrated constructional pragmatism in his Luckenwalde Hat
Factory (1921–23). Mies’s 1921 Friedrichstrasse Competition project simultaneously
presented the competing aesthetics in stark, orthographic stalemate: unrelenting
rationalism in section intersected by exuberant Expressionism in plan. Here, Mies fed a
Glass Chain crystal through a Sachlichkeit slicer, saving and stacking only the repetitive segments
from its middle girth. Gropius also vacillated. Expressionist balconies blurred his 1922
unbuilt Chicago Tribune Competition entry’s tectonic lucidity. Gradually, Berlin
architects reached better syntheses—Emil Fahrenkamp’s Shellhaus office block (1930–
Entries A–F 253
31) or Mendelsohn’s commercial Columbushaus (1931–32). The very fact that Berlin
architects promoted commercial architecture to an aesthetically significant task was as
important as this stylistic debate.
Weimar Berlin did not ignore social issues during this aesthetic deliberation. In
addition to “representing” elite industries and bourgeois commerce, Berlin sought
eminence in proletariat housing. Berlin’s Mietskasernen spawned a “back-to-the-earth” reform
movement favoring decentralization. Like other German cities (such as Frankfurt under
Ernst May), Berlin took inspiration from Raymond Unwin’s pleas for rural tranquility.
Conditions were so adverse that benevolent paternalism during late imperial Berlin
generated several outlying Siedlungen (low-density settlements of minimum dwellings infused with
light and air). Results accelerated with the Republic. Companies began paternalistically
sponsoring employee housing; gradually boroughs took over, then the city. S iedlung Lindenhof (1919–20),
an early collaboration between Martin Wagner (soon to be Berlin’s Building
Commissioner) and Bruno Taut (of Cologne’s 1914 Werkbund Exhibition fame), had
“Nuremberg” roofs and gables that mimicked “bourgeois-traditional” aesthetics. In 1920
Berlin became Greater Berlin; 93 separate polities united, creating the legal means to
reconfigure what was now physically the largest city in Europe. Promulgating tax and
interest relief, the Social Democrats engendered cooperatives such as GEHAG (Public
Benefit Homestead, Savings, and Building Corporation). These, in aggregate, realized
135,000 units housing 500,000 people between 1924 and 1930.
Most famous was Wagner and Taut’s GEHAG-sponsored Hufeisen (Horseshoe) S iedlung of garden
walk-ups in outlying Britz (1925–31). Its open community green spaces and shared
facilities were socially progressive. Modernist aesthetics also appeared—continuous flat
roofs, horizontal lines, clean surfaces, and cantilevers. Taut felt that this appearance
manifested the complex’s collective goals. Similar Siedlungen followed, such as Wagner, Taut, and
Häring’s Onkel-Toms-Hütte (1926–32) in Zehlendorf, again GEHAG sponsored. By 1928, with the
housing crisis still deteriorating citywide, this low-scaled density was questioned.
Wagner speculated that only G roβs iedlungen (taller, denser developments) could answer the need. The
Bauhaus-affiliated trio of Gropius, Hilberseimer, and Marcel Breuer pro duced high-rise
competition studies for Berlin reaching to 18 stories. Although no tall slabs materialized,
projects of over four stories (lacking immediate access to the ground) appeared on
superblocks nearer the city center, subdivided into “row form” configurations prefiguring
modernism’s later repetitiveness, scalelessness, and obsessiveness (regarding solar
orientation). Greater density did allow further collectivist gestures, such as centralized
mechanical plants.
Compared with Stuttgart’s Weissenhofsiedlung (1927), these projects were technically
conservative. Early talk of Fordist/Taylorist production methods was set aside. The
emphasis remained on social issues and their aesthetic representation. Modernism’s
revolutionary “new style” was often conflated with the “new society” during Weimar, as
Lane (1968) details, resulting in a highly politicized, even propagandistic, architecture.
Government support reinforced this reading. The Nazis took note, deriding Weimar
housing’s appearance as “Bolshevist.” Berlin’s Communist Party, ironically, had nothing
to do with these projects because it opposed any accommodation with the “corrupt”
bourgeois system.
The 1930–31 worldwide economic collapse halted Berlin’s social housing experiment,
leaving the Nazis to beat a dead horse. Just as the “Brown” cloud approached, Berlin’s
1931 Building Exhibition (titled “Dwelling of Our Time”) introduced modernism to a
wider audience. Berlin’s historicist tradition of outstanding villas in suburban districts
(Hermann Muthesius’s 1907–08 half-timbered Haus Freudenberg or Behrens’s 1911–12
classical Haus Wiegand) had already been updated with Hans and Wassili Luckhardt’s Le
Corbusian Zwei Einfamilienhäuser (1928) and Mendelsohn’s Expressionist Haus
Sternefeld (1924). Yet the 1931 Exhibition publicly interjected “Bolshevist” aesthetics
into bourgeois—as opposed to proletariat—homes. Mies translated his German Pavilion
at Barcelona into a lush exhibit house that the Nazis labeled a “horse stable.”
Though grand planners, Berlin’s Nazis built little. Only bits survive—such as Ernst
Sagebiel’s Aviation Ministry (1936–37) and Tempelhof Airport (1936–41). Hitler
impacted modernism not through buildings but inadvertently through expellant “gifts”
(mostly to the United States—Gropius, Mies, and ultimately Mendelsohn). Although
Entries A–F 255
architecture—the “Word in Stone”—was critical to Hitler’s ideological program, it
proved too costly after his war machine’s ignition. Still, until the bitter end, Hitler
crouched as amateur architect over vast models with his amanuensis, Albert Speer. How
sad for the profession that the 20th-century leader most architecturally impassioned was a
tasteless criminal. Hitler’s architectural proclivities were vivid—a reactionary
parochialism intended to resist “Bolshevist” cosmopolitanism and a perdurable
monumentality in keeping with world domination. As Nazi preferences hardened, the
Dessau Bauhaus was chased to Berlin (during Mies’s directorate), where the Gestapo
finally padlocked it. Nazi aesthetics mirrored—with opposing predilection—the Weimar
Socialists’ belief that architectural style symbolized specific political views. However,
the Nazis added a destructive, racist edge. The Nazi-fomented Kris tallnacht (Night of Broken Glass,
1938) saw 9 of 12 Berlin synagogues aflame, including Ehrenfried Hessel’s famed
Fasanenstraße Temple (1912).
Speer’s New Chancellery expansion (1938–39) housed Hitler. Stretching an
intimidating quarter mile, its 480-foot gallery doubled the length of Versailles’ Hall of
Mirrors. Hypertrophy drained Speer’s classicism of all humanism (entasis, for example,
disappeared). Megalomania roamed across Speer’s unrealized “Germania” Berlin Plan
(1937–42). This north/south avenue connected an 825-foot-diameter rotunda and 400-
foot-high triumphal arch. Contemporary praise of Speer (Krier, 1985) ignores his errors.
Speer blithely muffed axial transitions any Beaux-Arts journeyman could manage.
Existing conditions at the Chancellery necessitated a slight axial rotation. Speer properly
positioned a “Round Hall” to resolve this, then neglected to utilize it, merely crimping the
bend within the poché. Where his Berlin Plan’s axis turned, he positioned his gargantuan
rotunda but again earned no profit. The existing Reichstag, which Hitler wanted
incorporated into “Germania,” had been built several degrees shy of due north/south.
Speer merely ignored this, causing one side of his grand plaza to warp bizarrely. Speer’s
architectural goose-stepping could successfully accommodate only 4 of the 360 compass
degrees.
In 1943 the Western Allies launched the aerial Battle of Berlin. By 1945 incendiary
phosphorous had consumed 70 percent of the city’s center and 1.5 million Berliners’
homes. Soviet shelling came next, then tanks and capitulation. Only outlying Mietskasernen and Siedlungen
escaped unscathed. “Quadrasectioning” ensued; apportionments observed Berlin’s 20
districts—six falling American, four British, two French, and eight Soviet (including Mitte, the
historical kernel containing Schinkel’s battered works). From Berlin’s ceremonial
remnants, ideological sterilization claimed further shares. Between 1947 and 1951, the
standing walls of the Hohenzollern Stadtschloss and Hitler’s New Chancellery in the
Soviet sector and the Gestapo’s headquarters at the Prinz-Albrecht-Palais (once renovated
by Schinkel) in the American were dynamited.
Devastation opened possibilities for restructuring the unplanned Moloch that Berlin
had become. The Soviets, first on the scene, named Scharoun “City Architect.” Though
he would serve a mere year, the former Glass Chain Expressionist gained prominence in
postwar Berlin. Immediately, he formed the Planungs-Kollektiv, which by 1946 proposed the city’s
dissolution into more manageable, picturesquely “organic” neighborhoods. Rubble
clearance and infrastructure rigidity prevented any action. After losing his post, Scharoun
pressed forward with a lyrical housing plan (1949) for the bombed-out, Soviet-controlled
Friedrichshain district. However, as the Communist’s massive Berlin-Treptow victory
Encyclopedia of 20th-century architecture 256
monument (1947–48) foretold, modernism had scant future in the Soviet sector. In the
Soviet Union, the “Constructivist versus traditionalist” debate ended by 1934; socialist
realism’s pseudoclassicism triumphed. Once East Germany achieved statehood with East
Berlin as capital (1949), the Stalinist aesthetic of “Progressive Tradition” was imposed.
Apparatchiks attacked modernism (both Berliner modes) as formalist, cosmopolitan, and
decadent. Scharoun’s Friedrichshain plan was shelved. Stalinallee (1952–60) emerged
instead—a mile-long avenue of housing reminiscent of Moscow’s Gorky Street, with
sculpted street walls of symmetrically ponderous, tripartite, pilastered facades by various
architectural cooperatives (spearheaded by Hermann Henselmann, a chameleon who had
conveniently renounced his own Bauhaus work).
As division’s reality settled in, the West responded with show-piece housing of its
own: the 1957 Interbau Hansaviertel district (a western bombed-out zone). A consciously
international team of 53 architects representing 14 countries (including Aalto and Oscar
Niemeyer) created a medley of loosely grouped, reinforced-concrete point blocks and
slabs. Yet Hansaviertel’s Progressivism rapidly seemed as superficially clichéd as
Stalinallee’s regressive pomposity. Conventional flats, dressed in gratuitously variegated
balcony rhythms, rested on Le Corbusiersian stilts. For the same exhibition but on a
distant site, Le Corbusier gave West Berlin an “authentic” knockoff of his Marseilles Unité.
Also for the exhibition, the United States presented Berlin with Hugh Stubbins’s
Kongresshalle (1956–57)—a suspended hyperbolic paraboloid that became something of
a technological “gift horse” when one arch collapsed in 1980. More evocative of
modernism’s continued viability was Egon Eiermannn’s Kaiser-Wilhelm-
Gedächtniskirche reconstruction (Memorial Church, 1957–63). Movingly preserving
fragments of the bombing’s “zero hour,” when time stopped, this dark stained-glass
honey-comb increasingly became the unofficial architectural symbol of West Berlin’s
island vigil. Western dreams of urban reunification continued with the Hauptstadt Berlin
competition ignoring the city’s division (1959).
In 1954 Nikita Khrushchev began attacking Stalinist architecture.
Modernist slabs gradually rose in East Berlin. Yet just as the ideological
combatants’ aesthetics aligned, physical separation heightened. In 1961 a
102.5-mile “Wall”—Berlin’s most famously infamous edifice—encircled
the Western enclave as an “Antifascist Protective Barrier.” The Cold War
stalemate’s face, it became the 20th century’s most sublimely meaningful
construction. As Baker (1993) notes, the Wall evolved through several
“generations.” First came an improvised breeze block and barbed-wire
barrier. Next was a “lollipop” profile of stacked, prefabricated, asbestosstoked
concrete panels crowned with a rounded pipe denying purchase to
grappling hooks. Last was a massively prefabricated L section, also round
capped, with its foot pointing toward East Berlin to prevent overturning in
an imagined Western attack (and also escape by digging). Formidable as
these variants became, it was open space, not the Wall, that killed (122 or
more times). The Wall delimited a death strip (often hundreds of meters
wide, with watchtowers, lights, and dog runs), sandwiched by a second
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barrier of concrete or barbed wire. This strip necessitated demolition of
many square miles of East Berlin’s adjoining neighborhoods, including
churches. To West Berlin, only the smooth backside of the L showed—the
ultimate in Neue Sachlichkeit aesthetics, soon daubed with gorgeous graffiti.
Standardization of construction components passed a critical test at the
Wall. Gradually, satellite towns of grim, cratelike prefabricated housing
ringed the East (the Plattenbau of Marzhan, Hohenschönhausen, and Hellersdorf).
The West’s satellites, Märkisches Viertel (1963–74) and Gropiusstadt
(1962–72), bared similarity.
Absolute division exacerbated Berlin’s preexisting polycentrism. Through rival
“centers,” both ideologies sought urban “wholeness.” The East’s path was governmental
and bland; the West’s cultural and heterogeneous. In the old kernel, the Communists’
curtain-wall “Palace of the Republic” usurped the site of the Hohenzollern Stadtschloss.
Schinkel’s Bauakademie was razed (1961–62), making way for the Foreign Ministry’s
morose white slab. A symbolically assertive 365-meter Television Tower (1965–69) leapt
from nearby Alexanderplatz. Vast seas of empty pavement awaited rallies. The West,
lacking federal presence, responded with Kulturforum—a diffusely suburbanized zone,
where Scharoun’s ecstatic Philharmonic and Staatsbibliothek (1960–63, 1967–76) jostled
with Mies’s silent Neue National-galerie (1965–68). Expressionism again confronted Neue Sachlichkeit.
Swathes of arterial green space, as crippling to urbanism as the East’s barren plazas, ran
between. Nearby, Hentrich and Petschnigg’s Europa Center (1965), an echo of Skidmore,
Owings and Merrill’s New York Lever House, capped the chic Kürfurstendamm.
American design principles settled heavily on West Berlin.
Postmodernism in West Berlin invoked “critical reconstruction” as urban tonic.
Promoted by Josef Paul Kleihues (1987), this “anti-Hansaviertel” methodology respected
traditional street lines and block heights in healing rent urban fabric. Its manifestation
was the IBA (International Building Exposition, 1984–87), celebrating Berlin’s 750th
anniversary. Titled “living in the city,” IBA fostered midscale housing in-fill in five
Berlin districts by international and German architects—Aldo Rossi, John Hejduk,
Charles Moore, Peter Eisenman, Rob Krier, Oswald Mathias Ungers, and others.
Nonhousing projects included James Stirling’s Berlin Science Center (1984–87) and,
consistent with Berlin’s traditional interest in technological architecture, Gustav Peichl’s
Phosphate Elimination Plant (1981–85). The results, both sober and meretricious,
succeeded in keeping the divided city in the architectural spotlight, even as its
schizophrenic cachet aged. Critical reconstruction touched the East, too, in the historicist
re-creation of the Nikolai Quarter (also celebrating the anniversary). The West snubbed
this as kitsch.
The Wall and East Germany’s collapse in 1989 unleashed startling development
pressures. Construction cranes laced the sky, as the surreal transmogrification from
ideological battle-ground to world corporate and financial center began. Traffic, never an
issue in circumscribed West Berlin, exploded overnight. The Wall, instantaneously a
commodity, was chipped to bits, its best graffiti-carrying segments sold to museums
(only a few lengths remained in situ, with one inaugurated as a Wall Memorial in 1998).
Public planning commenced only following German reunification and the election of a
unified Berlin city council in late 1990. Berlin’s close victory in the 1991 vote to move
Encyclopedia of 20th-century architecture 258
the federal seat from Bonn opened the need for a wholly reconfigured capital, a task
exceeding even François Mitterrand’s revitalization of Paris during the 1980s. A plethora
of raucous competitions followed.
Potsdamerplatz, lying across the Wall’s wound (between the East’s old kernel and the
West’s Kulturforum), developed first, with Sony, Daimler Benz, and others grabbing turf.
The city launched a competition to reassert control. The results prefigured a duality that
recurred throughout the 1990s: a choice between exuberant narcissism and the “sturdy
stuff” of old Prussia. A desire to celebrate Berlin’s 20th-century ethos of diversity,
discontinuity, and rupture clashed with a desire to return to (an imagined) 18th-century
historical normalcy through critical reconstruction. Selected was Hilmer and Sattler’s
restatement of blocky, continuous urbanism (though this came too late to tame Helmut
Jahn’s gesticulating Sony complex). More conservatism would follow. Hans Stimmann,
Berlin’s new building commissioner, felt that Berlin was destroyed as much by postwar
planners as by Allied bombs. Height limitations (22-meter facades), masonry stipulations,
and requirements for housing were imposed. Stimman’s ideals were attacked as a “New
Teutonia.”
Berlin’s affinity for demolition continued into the post-Wall era. East Germany’s
Foreign Ministry was razed (1995), purportedly to make way for the improbable
rebuilding of Schinkel’s Bauakademie. A scaffold and canvas mock-up of the Stadtschloß
(1993) seriously threatened the Communist “Palace of the Republic.” Economic realities
alone forced government re-use of a number of threatened Nazi office structures.
The 1992 Spreebogen competition for Germany’s new federal zone attracted 835
entries from 44 countries (but few from Eastern architects; new Berlin began on Western
terms). The site, adjoining the Reichstag, passed over the positional ghost of Speer’s
north/south axis. Given this “counterprecedent,” an east/west axial composition was
purposefully selected. This, by Axel Schultes, symbolically bridged the divided city’s
halves, giving attention to reestablishing the district’s interrupted tissue. Schultes also
won the competition for a new Federal Chancellery (1994). Both of Schultes’s schemes
assumed blocky forms. England’s Sir Norman Foster prevailed in the Reichstag
renovation competition, providing a new high-tech dome after controversy prevented his
winning proposal’s immense, tented canopy (1994–2000). A squat, elliptical doughnut
scheme by Gruber and Kleine-Kraneburg won the Presidential Office competition (1994).
As Balfour (1995) reported, disappointment grew with each announcement. Faced
with an opportunity that actually justifies the word “millennial,” Berlin’s almost complete
reliance on “sturdy stuff” deflates imagination. A signal exception is Daniel Libeskind’s
Jewish Museum addition to the Berlin Museum (1993–96). Harrowed with history yet
never witnessed before, this work, like Eiermannn’s Memorial Church, is an expression
of 20th-century architecture’s potential to speak of a future that mournfully roots but
never enslaves itself to the past. This should be new/old Berlin—a place of reciprocal
tension.

ABTEIBERG MUNICIPAL MUSEUM,MÖNCHENGLADBACH, GERMANY

Designed by Hans Hollein; completed 1982
Since the 1990s, it has not been uncommon for architects and their clients to break
with the two previously prevailing alternatives—temple or warehouse—for art museums,
but such a typological rupture had been dramatically anticipated two decades earlier, by
Hans Hollein in the Museum Abteiberg, a unique building tailored to an unusual site and
a distinctive collection. The Pritzker Prize laureate of 1985, who was born in Vienna in
1934 and is an artist, teacher, and creator of furniture, interiors, and exhibitions, has at
Mönchengladbach assembled a virtual primer of museum design, one that has brought a
heretofore unknown visceral excitement to the vocation of museum going. In contrast to
later attempts in this genre, however, Hollein’s achievement has contributed to an
intensified appreciation of the museum’s contents rather than making a personal
statement at their expense.
Although Hollein has learned from the institutional buildings of Louis I.Kahn and
Alvar Aalto, he listens to his own music, which—to pursue the metaphor—includes
concerti from the 18th, symphonies from the 19th, and popular songs from the 20th
centuries. His eclecticism served him well in this complex commission, made more
difficult by the need for the museum to serve urban as well as aesthetic ends. Hollein has
linked Mönchengladbach’s town center on the heights with the medieval Ettal Abbey
(today the city hall) on the slopes below, assembling a multi-tiered museum from a series
of discrete elements of different sizes and shapes that provide a series of delightfully
varied indoor and outdoor rooms. Distributing the individual volumes in space rather than
Entries A–F 13
containing them within a monolithic whole allowed him to maintain the picturesque scale
of the town; at the subterranean level, the disparate sections are united.
Although designing a museum is always challenging, it is perhaps less onerous when,
in contrast to those encyclopedic institutions that are in continual flux, its holdings
consist of a focused group of works. Kahn found such a golden opportunity in the
Kimbell Museum, and Hollein has exploited the similar possibilities here, where he
worked closely with the director, Jonathan Cladders, in formulating the program. They
believe that today the museum itself represents a Ges amtkunstwerk (total work of art), “a huge scenario
into which the individual work is fitted…not the autonomy of the work at any price but
the deliberately staged correspondence between space and work of art” (Klotz, 1985, p. 19). This especially applies to contemporary art, which frequently is
deliberately produced for a museum setting. The plan that Hollein and Cladders evolved
is without precedent for this building type. None of the customary tropes, whether
conventional or modern—vaulted galleries arranged symmetrically, the universal space,
the proverbial white cube—are present. Instead, the combination of small, contained
cabinets and larger rooms perfectly accommodates a collection that, although including
some historical pieces, is mainly focused on the post-World War II period and, although
international, is richly endowed with work by American artists of such competing
movements as Minimalism, Post-Painterly Abstraction, and Pop. Many works are in the
Encyclopedia of 20th-century architecture 14
form of installations without customary boundaries or frames and do not necessarily
require natural light.
From the town, one enters the museum precinct via an elevated walkway that leads to
a stone-faced platform whereon is set a tower containing administrative offices; a library;
workshops and storage; a cubic, top-lighted undivided volume for temporary displays; the
shedroofed, zinc-clad “clover-leaf” pavilion for the permanent collection; and the
entrance temple. The platform also covers museum spaces excavated into the hill, and
from it, one can descend gradually to curving terraces, furnished with sculpture, that
border the gardens of the former abbey; beneath a portion of the terraces are additional
exhibition areas.
Hollein has rejected the prescribed routes encountered in traditional museums for
mysterious, polymorphous paths that compel the viewer to wander on her own and
discover unexpected places, then to turn back on them or chance on new chambers.
Because chronology is not the issue it would be for a historically based collection, the ad
hoc character is stimulating rather than frustrating. Upstairs and downstairs, under- and
above-ground, the variously configured galleries illuminated by diverse means—daylight
through windows and skylights and artificial light via incandescent, neon, and fluorescent
fixtures—permit individual works to be perceived in the setting most sympathetic to their
makers’ intentions. The most organized part of the display areas comprises what Hollein
calls the “cloverleaf”—a group of seven “kissing squares,” to use Kahn’s formulation,
that are traversed at the corners. Set under saw-toothed skylights, these rooms are ideal
for big pieces by such artists as Andy Warhol, Frank Stella, Carl Andre, and Roy
Lichtenstein. There are also curved rooms, some with undulating walls that are positively
Baroque in character; double-height spaces and circular steps add further drama.
Hollein’s rejection of the convention of amorphous flexible areas, dominant since the
1940s, in favor of a rich variety of specific and distinctive spaces, would in the 1990s
become a popular solution for art museums—yet another example of the way the
Museum Abteiberg adumbrates many later schemes for this type of institution.
Also prescient is Hollein’s interjection of playfulness and irony into the reverence that
typically pervades museum design. Although marble clads some of the surfaces, it is
combined with less elevated masonry materials like brick and sandstone. Reflective as
well as transparent glass appears; zinc is placed beside chromium and steel. One side of
the temple-like pavilion that forms the main entrance sports graffiti in red paint, matching
the color of some of the railings. Exterior light fixtures have an industrial character in
contrast to the lush surrounding landscape and the textured brick walls and paths. The
visitor, constantly encountering the unpredictable, is sensitized to the daring originality of
the art displayed.
It is instructive to compare Museum Abteiberg with another German museum from the
same period that similarly had a profound effect on subsequent museum design—James
Stirling’s Neue Staatsgalerie (1977–84) at Stuttgart. Both are set on irregular terrain and
require urbanistic interventions, but Stirling’s solution revives and updates the 19thcentury
museum paradigm, whereas Hollein has jettisoned all previous solutions. Both
make reference to industrial as well as classical buildings and use the technique of
compositional collage, yet their differences illuminate the manifold possibilities inherent
in the museum program.