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

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Once entered, however, the building offers a far more extraordinary and confident impression. The waving edges of the lobby bridges and the fluttering ceiling planes read like enormous unfurling flower petals, opening the whole building outward.

From within, the sculptural and layered aesthetic seems deeply tied to the building's purpose. The drama of the informal gathering spaces and their progression is pregnant with expectation. These spaces present themselves-perhaps too romantically-as settings for the great affairs of state. The agoralike lobbies almost palpably ask politicians to seize the moment. One imagines the chancellor posed in front of the vast curve of windows that frame the executive's office, gazing over the Tiergarten, to the Reichstag, the Brandenburg gate and the skyline of the reunited city. Can one do anything but put the pettiness of day-to-day politics in perspective, summoning the wisdom to recognize the great issues at stake? This is no doubt an idealistic if not naïve view of how architecture can affect the way politicians work, but it is in this kind of expression that the building is truly representational-its grandeur is not empty, but embodies peoples' aspirations.

On the other hand, as one gazes across the dispiriting spectrum of public building in America-the prisonlike public schools or the cookie-cutter classicist municipal buildings-we find an aspiration to little more than value engineering. In Washington, D.C., a planned Capitol Visitor Center will be buried-speaking to no values at all. Whether or not he fully succeeded in his aspiration, Schultes dared the German people to express greatness and they, courageously, took him up on it.

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