Behind the discreet facade of DG Bank, in the symbolic center of Berlin, Frank Gehry takes corporate architecture someplace it’s never been

Architectural Record, October 2001

Only the aficionado would recognize the façade of Pariser Platz Number 3 as the work of today’s master of architecture-as-sculpture–Frank O. Gehry. The exterior only hints at the presence of an object within that is astonishing, menacing, and captivating all at once. Gehry calls the object a “horse’s head.” DG Bank, the Frankfurt-based financial-services company that built the building, prefers to call it a conference center.

The object is just a meeting room in the heart of the building, but its power cannot be denied. Is that a snarling snout that confronts us as we approach it? Is that a single, staring eye off to the left or is it a bit of fabric torn by a wind gust? As the visitor moves around the object, a glazed slit becomes visible, like the hinge between jaw and skull. Somehow, a few dozen metal panels has become feral, suggesting a mammalian form frozen as it struggles against the tight confines of its enclosure.

This is the Gehry aesthetic in its most psychologically naked form. And yet this object could not wield its emotive power over us without the neutral, arcaded, Douglas fir-paneled atrium that grasps it so tightly or the child’s-block simplicity of the stone-clad exterior.

For this stunning contrast between object and container, Gehry must thank the rigid, highly prescriptive urban-design and zoning requirements that applied to the site. There were so many rules because Pariser Platz is, as Gehry calls it, “the holy of holies,” the setting for the symbol of reunited Berlin–the 1788 Brandenburg Gate that encloses the Platz on the West. The square found itself in an East-West no-man’s land during the divided-city era, and most of its war-blasted ruins were bulldozed. The rules are intended to restore a polite dignity to the reconstructed buildings around the square and defer to the Gate. Even though prestigious buildings (including ones for the French and American embassies) are in various stages of planning, construction, or completion on other sites around the square, the rules intentionally preclude the sculpturally individualistic object buildings that Gehry and other of today’s prominent practitioners are famous (and notorious) for.

Regulations governed height, mandated a mix of housing and office uses, and demanded daylight access for every office. Gehry didn’t fight the rules. (“I never would have done a Bilbao on such a site,” he says–even if there had been no restrictions.) Instead, he built an aesthetic strategy around the regulatory regime. In the facades, he has observed the requirements for string courses, setbacks, and proportion of stone wall to openings, but used them to engage the imperial scale of the square and the Gate. DG Bank’s south elevation (less rule-constrained than the Platz-facing north façade) offers, by contrast, a jaunty row of plump, convex flutes.

On this site, where only two narrow ends offered unencumbered exposures, meeting the daylight requirement precluded any but a courtyard-building arrangement, Gehry concluded. So he cut a skylit atrium into the center of the building, digging it one level below grade, which packed DG’s required 190,000 square feet of office space within the mandated zoning envelope. Another narrow, skylit atrium opens a membrane of daylight between the offices and 33,000 square feet of apartments wedged into a south-facing slab.

The design team experimented with ways to create within the atrium an “interior landscape” for staff to gaze upon. In the competition-winning scheme, the atrium was garnished with a glass sphere, a five-story-high tree, and a strange white object, something like an animal head draped in cloth.

After Gehry was selected in a competition, the bank decided to turn the building from a speculative project into its most important branch, akin to an embassy, according to Detlef Marquardt, a DG Bank vice-president who is the spokesman for the project. “We see it as an emblem of reunification, the new aspirations of Berlin embodied by art and architecture,” he said.

At the bank’s urging, Gehry’s team had eliminated the tree and the other shapes intruding on the atrium space, leaving only the shrouded-head object, which made it, as Gehry says, “the object of desire.” As in other highly articulated shapes by Gehry, the final form of what would become the main conference room was ruled by intuition, honed through modelmaking in a variety of media, and intended to evoke a range of metaphors and emotions without committing to any single one.

Gehry described the shape as the skull of a fossilized prehistoric horse’s head when it was first developed, for the unbuilt Lewis House. Gehry credits Peter Lewis for allowing him to take his aesthetic ambitions farther than any built project ever has. “People think I’m a wild man,” he explains. “but I do have a sense of propriety, and I may have edited this out if not for Lewis.” Initially he simply borrowed the shape from the Lewis design to convey to DG Bank something of the nature of what he hoped to do. As he refined it, it became a means to further explore the drapelike shapes that have appeared in recent projects, especially the Experience Music Project in Seattle (August 2000 page 106). Gehry is particularly taken by the work of Claus Sluder, a Dutch sculptor of the Renaissance, whose approach to drapery scholar Craig Harbison has described as “deeply undercut, as expressive as any human arms or legs could be.” In one study, the architects hung red velvet to achieve the desired shape, then poured beeswax over it. Bernini did the same thing with wet plaster, but he did not have a computer digitizer to capture the result.

Early studies of the conference-room cladding show strips of metal shingled over each other, but that was deemed by the bank to resemble armor too closely–an inappropriate image to evoke given the disastrous consequences of Berlin’s bellicose history. Gehry’s team made the panels smoother, more skinlike, but also far more difficult to fabricate. After two suppliers failed to produce acceptable panels, a third finally finished the cladding 23 months after the building was occupied.

Compelling as the conference room is, it does tie the interior together. “My intent is that the conference room acts as a fulcrum between the roof and the glass underneath,” says Gehry, “that you could almost remove them as a single piece.” Standing in the lobby, you can see the glass above the reception floor swell up in a crystalline wave that seems to carry the conference room with it. The atrium roof appears to unfurl from behind the top of the conference room. Above the glass roof, a curve of metal projects like a prehensile fin above the glass vault, visually locking the lower volume of the offices to the higher slab of apartments behind.

Even conventional elements of this building are astonishing, like the enormous glass openings on Pariser Platz, which slide open automatically with the deliberateness of safe doors. The conference room, however, leaves behind an indelible impression–and raises questions. “It brings up a lot of subconscious stuff,” explained partner Craig Webb, which he says was intentional, but, “we were worried about the darker connotations.” An object that could be a sacred crypt housing the dessicated remains of some modern hero, turns out to be, inside, a comfortingly womblike meeting room, equipped with all the acoutrements of modern business). Why is such powerful symbolism deployed to such a prosaic end? Gehry’s designs trigger a wealth of images, which enrich the experience of his buildings. But doesn’t the lack of content in the symbolism here devalue the emotions such a powerfully made piece is capable of evoking? Is this just another architectural bauble to be checked off by the tourist hordes as they swirl through Berlin?

To be sure, this is a business building, not a monument nor a history museum. One can’t fault Gehry for responding to the bank’s pragmatic needs, while taking this structure into an aesthetic realm almost unimaginable for a commercial client. And DG Bank’s extraordinary commitment to the project has added immeasurably to the artistic wealth of Berlin.

But Gehry did not want it to mean more. “It doesn’t represent anything,” he says. Indeed, after a close colleague told Gehry that the imagery sent the wrong message in history-sensitive Berlin, Gehry got assurances from a number of sources that the conference room did not make “a politically inappropriate statement.” Gehry hopes people see the image as “friendly,” as “about making an exciting place.”

DG Bank shows that Gehry has that all-too-rare power to move us, but is he hiding his power under a bushel of deference? The absence is especially glaring in modern Berlin where architects of as wide-ranging a sensibility as Norman Foster, Peter Zumthor, Daniel Libeskind, and Peter Eisenmann have taken real aesthetic risks in designs that attempt to grapple with the city’s tragic past and its hoped-for better future. Gehry shows us he can reach into our subconscious, but does he want to take the riskiest possible course–to grab our emotions, like the best artists, playwrights, and writers do, and take us someplace we need to go? Maybe DG is just a dry run for the great commemorative or memorial project the architect has yet to be offered.