Axel Shultes' controversial struggle to realize Germany's new Chancellery offers lessons for American public building design

1 | 2 | 3 | next>>

Wags describe Berlin's new Chancellery as a "washing machine." Indeed, not a few people see these offices for united Germany's chief executive as almost ludicrously bombastic. But if a deeper consideration of the Chancellery's architecture does not fully allay these glib assessments, there is much to be learned about how we use design in important public contexts and how architecture can represent national values.

Americans tend to prefer architectural modesty in public buildings to symbolize the aspiration (if not the reality) of small government. Thanks to the tragically successful use of architectural monumentality and theatricality as propaganda by Hitler and his chief architect, Albert Speer, today's Germans maintain an aversion to imposing edifices and to a design rhetoric of power. The problem in either case is how to turn a negative virtue into a positive architectural expression.

Architects wring their hands over the diminished role of design in the public realm, but conditions will not improve without considering what public architecture says-the human or civic values it represents. Axel Schultes and Charlotte Frank, of Schultes Architekten, in Berlin, grappled with the anti-monumental urge in their design for one of united Germany's new centers of power: the 690,000-square-foot Berlin Chancellery, which returned to Berlin last year after a half-century absence.

The Chancellery's east façade-it's most public side-expresses an architectural ambivalence for all to see. The 120-foot-high cubic central block rises imposingly above embracing office wings. But the casting of the building's concrete shell appears to have frozen a kind of explosion in which the top of the cube flares upward in a tentlike arc, rent with great curved openings. Looking as if they were flung centripetally out from within the Chancellery's metal and glass walls, a small herd of piers-vestigial classical columns, maybe-dot the forecourt and a recessed fifth-floor balcony.

(Continued)

1 | 2 | 3 | next>>