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English Publication : Architectural Realities

 

Architectural Realities

Modell eines Atriums © Behnisch & partner

Germany's contribution to the 14th Biennale of Architecture in Venice, curated by the commissioners Alex Lehnerer and Savvas Ciriacidis, is the point of departure for this issue of ARCH+. "Bungalow Germania," as their installation in the German Pavilion is called, comprises a life-sized replica of select rooms and features of the Kanzlerbungalow [Chancellor's Bungalow], that modest, inscrutable glass building in Bonn that Sep Ruf designed for West German Chancellor Ludwig Erhard in 1964. Upon first encounter, Lehnerer and Ciriacidis' installation might appear as nothing more than an intervention into the space of the German Pavilion, which was significantly remodeled under National Socialism. Further consideration of their work, however, raises a number of important questions about architecture and about how field conceives of itself. In grappling with these questions in this issue, two thematic rubrics emerged: the architecture of power, and the power of architecture.

The installation in the German Pavilion—a physical juxtaposition of two diametrically opposed moments in the history of representational German architecture—offers a uniquely productive opportunity to consider the question of architecture's agency. This issue of ARCH+ approaches the topic from a variety of angles, broaching, for example, the contemporary debates surrounding the philsophical movement known as "New Realism," and delineating the movement's protracted entanglement with architecture.

 

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Editorial
Anh-Linh Ngo, Nikolaus Kuhnert

Editorial

The basic question is as follows: to what extent does architecture reproduce or illustrate social contexts and concepts? Or—alternatively—is architecture a reality unto itself, which creates new contexts of its own?
Project
Sep Ruf, Vincent Meyer-Madaus

Chancellor’s Bungalow

The building was controversial from the start, and continued to be so among Erhard’s successors; chancellors like Helmut Kohl subjected the Bungalow to drastic renovations before the German government ultimately relocated to Berlin in the 1990s.
Essay
Thilo Hilpert

The Chancellor’s Bungalow

But ‘eliminating’ this uncomfortable memory—and not just in an architectural sense—meant actually practicing what psychologists call “repression.” On a national level, this was precisely the task assigned to the Kanzlerbungalow’s “glass walls of Neues Bauen”.
Project
Egon Eiermann, Sep Ruf, Jesse Coburn

German Pavilion, Brussels

The Pavilion was a testament both to West Germany’s fledgling democracy, and to the difficulty of finding suitable expression for the young country in architectural form.
Essay
Stephan Trüby

Poststressal Domesticity

Is it possible that herein lies the major difference with Germany, where a “Project Germany” analogous to “Project Japan”— a nationalistic project of reconstruction—never existed?
Essay
Olaf Asendorf

The Chancellor’s Bunkers

To the constitutional bodies it was built to protect, the government bunker lost its final justification as a defensive measure. Today, the rest of the bunker and the Kanzlerbungalow’s air-raid shelters serve as witnesses to historical processes that are far from over.
Essay
Carola Ebert

Pavilionizing the Bungalow

In the reconstruction (at times excessive in its details) and its materiality, the reality of a modernism that is both representative and residential confronts a completely different understanding of representative architecture: the material reality of the German Pavilion.
Essay
Ole W. Fischer

In the Shadow of the Past

Since the Kanzlerbungalow’s design and meaning can only be truly grasped in the context of postwar German history, the superimposition of the two edifices inevitably becomes a commentary on, or confrontation between, two historically connected political regimes—a commentary that’s beyond the authors’ control.
Essay
Georg Vrachliotis

Transparency as a Political Psychopharmaceutical

Transparency seems to have an effect on society that can be described as that of a “political psychopharmaceutical.”
Essay
Heinrich Klotz

Iconology of a Capital City

A grandeur that refuses to merely demonstrate power; sovereignty without the monumentality of domination. If this possibility went unrealized, then it’s because a mentality tempted by other values has forbidden the (at least aesthetic) possibility from taking shape.
Project
Behnisch Architekten

Federal Buildings, Bonn

With this design, Behnisch & partner sought not only to facilitate democratic interactions between individuals and the greater public, but also to express this openness of exchange in an architectural form.
Project
Egon Eiermann, Simon Schulz

German Embassy Chancery

When the young Federal Republic of Germany set about building its new embassy in Washington in the late 1950s, it was faced with a challenge more significant than coming up with an architecturally flawless design.
Essay
Kenneth Frampton

In the Name of the Father

Where the one looks to mix itself symbiotically with nature, the other stands aloof to look out over a supposedly compliant and pacified world. are we reading too much here into these phantom signs or do we perceive correctly the neurasthenic nerve of our fragile time?
Project
Oswald Mathias Ungers, Simon Schulz

Residence of the German Ambassador

While this hall of pillars was not wellreceived by German critics, who thought it evoked the bombastic architecture of authority promulgated by the Nazis, the international reception of Ungers’ design was predominantly positive.
Essay
Karin Wilhelm

“Farewell to Yesterday”

However, as Henri Lefebvre remarked in 1970, “Contemporary thought and action can only accommodate empty spaces and the void of space.” In this sense, the void in front of the Bundeskanzleramt— the absent “People’s Forum”—serves to remind us of Willy Brandt’s impassioned call to “dare more democracy.”
Project
Schultes Frank Architekten

„Band des Bundes“, Berlin

By cutting through the former path of the “death strip” and thereby connecting East and West Berlin, the Band was meant to become an architectural icon of reunified Germany.
Project
Stephan Braunfels Architekten

Paul-Löbe-Haus, Berlin

Braunfels acknowledged the idea behind the Band with an imposing canopy that marks the western entrance to the building and creates a visual connection to the Federal Chancellery across the way.
Project
Foster and Partners, Rob Madole

Reichstag Renovation

In 1992, a competition was held to renovate the former Reichstag building designed by Paul Wallot (1882–1894)—a monumental, eclectic structure crowned by a modern steel-and-glass cupola.
Project
Schultes Frank Architekten, Stephan Redeker

Federal Chancellery

In 1992, a competition was held to renovate the former Reichstag building designed by Paul Wallot (1882–1894)—a monumental, eclectic structure crowned by a modern steel-and-glass cupola.
Essay
Dieter Hoffmann-Axthelm

Power Without Images

It’s not just despondency; it’s cowardice. If, from this vantage, we look back at the bygone architectural ideology of a transparent democracy, we can only laugh (or better yet, cry about the self-ideologization).
Project
Peter Eisenman Architects, Sara Lusic-Alavanja

Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe

To Eisenman, nothing seemed less worthy of being pursued at such a place than a “legible” architecture. The monument thus expresses his conception of an autonomous architecture, one aspect of the critical discipline he advocated.
Timeline
Vincent Meyer-Madaus, Felix Rebers, Achim Reese

Realism in Architecture

According to György Lukács, architecture reflects reality in two ways: structurally and socially. First, the laws of nature determine the fixed reality of architecture, and architecture reflects those laws with constructions that are grounded in science.
Essay
Robert Burghardt

A new Realism

Rescuing architecture from “omnipotence and impotence” will require taking reality as source material, replete with its contradictions and points of resistance. It will require taking it up productively, in order to avoid ending up with a superficial reproduction of these contradictions.
Essay
Maurizio Ferraris

Margins of Architecture

Clarifying these limits, bringing them into focus in an orderly fashion and confronting oneself with them is, in my judgment, the mark of realism in every field, and, therefore, of realism in architecture as well.
Essay
Lars Frers

Borderlands of Materiality

It is thus less about authenticity, or the aura of an original in contrast to stale reproductions, and more so about the way corporeal or bodily experience unfolds in the movement across space—about the encounters, frictions, horizons, and turbulences it bears in its wake.
Essay
Andreas Rumpfhuber

When Reality Overtakes Utopia

Koolhaas’ proposal is also replete with ironic (if not downright cynical) elements and references, which let us intimate that Koolhaas himself might have his own doubts about the project.
Essay
Christa Kamleithner

What Architecture Does

Architecture becomes a process of gathering different actors together and mediating between them, while architects themselves no longer work as autonomous actors, but become translators and “mediators,” who present “occasions, circumstances, and precedents.”
Essay
Joaquín Medina Warmburg

A Sliding Door to life: The Bungalow as Bioreality

Neutra’s writings and buildings make clear how much, for him, the socalled “bungalow” resembled a psychotope, one that reconciled nature and a technologized civilization.
Features
Martino Stierli, Savvas Ciriacidis, Alex Lehnerer

Bungalow Germania

Martino Stierli in conversation with Alex Lehnerer and Savvas Ciriacidis, the commissioners of the German Pavilion.