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

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This is how Schultes has explained these disparate gestures: "We had wanted the new chancellery in the Spreebogen to be a place of balance-balance and contrast. Heavy and light, closed and open, intimate and public-a stimulus to the political imagination of governed and governors alike." The trees sprouting 46 feet above grade in the top of the piers are intended to add a touching Romanticism, á la Karl Friedrich Schinkel. They "temper above all the stiff ceremony of our ‘cour d'honneur,' " Schultes has written, "touching a chord of German yearning . . . a yearning for the south, for the fountains of all our cultural experience."

Schultes ultimately fails to reconcile the opposites he so colorfully aspires to balance. He has manifested his anxiety about the design and his struggle to realize an expression appropriate to a new idealistic and democratic Germany in speeches, articles and interviews. (For a blow-by-blow, see Michael Z. Wise, Capital Dilemma: Germany's Search for a New Architecture of Democracy; 1998, Princeton Architectural Press) But he did choose a difficult strategy.

Schultes won the competition for the Chancellery because he eschewed the self-consciously monumental conventions of the classical tradition yet also moved away from the self-effacing Modernism that made the Bonn capital all but invisible. He has never been willing to let go of some traditional architectural devices that strike him as primordial, however. He finds these in the elongated, column-lined courtyards of Isfahan, the waterfall of courts and loggias in Hadrian's villa, the pavilionlike ground plan of Hagia Sophia, anchoring a gaggle of heavy-masonry cells. These ancient landmarks share an expressionism of surface and materials akin to the "tectonic" architectural culture-advocated particularly by Kenneth Frampton-that aspires to authentically root buildings in a time and place.

While eliding the minefield of unfortunate connotations less abstract historicist devices would have evoked, there's an implication of moralism, in Schultes' hands, an implied "honesty" in the use of materials and forms that, at least in the building's external expression, seems not fully earned. We have been down the archaic-as-expression road before, with Le Corbusier, Louis Kahn, Carlo Scarpa, even James Stirling. Since you can find quotations from almost all of these seminal figures in the Chancellery, it's hard not to conclude that Schultes has failed to find a transformative artistic mechanism the way his mentors did.

Schultes not only admires the rich procession of solid and void in archaic architecture, he seeks to capture that "power in building," a "lightness of stone" and a "materiality of light," as he writes in Chancellery Berlin: Axel Schultes, Charlotte Frank (Edition Axel Menges, 2002). It sounds contradictory, and remains unresolved. The Chancellery's layers of surface and the enormous spans in cast concrete testify to Schultes' attempt to invent a mode of expression that plays on the viewer's expectations about load, weight and span. This mode relies on a literacy about construction that may no longer exist in a "you can make it out of anything" world. Even in his own terms, the scale of the project partly defeated Schultes, he admits. The sheer quantity of cast-in-place concrete involved, for example, made it impossible to get a consistently stonelike natural variegation. Instead of the "sensuous grey" of the unadorned surface Schultes sought, he had to settle for the flatness of paint.

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