Floornature - Naturally Inspired

Particularly since reunification, which for once in history conferred on Berlin the status of being a centre of development, architecture and urban development have been passionately debated in a city which has become something of an open-air museum of the avant-garde. With the dismantling of the scaffolding after the boom years of the 90s a city has emerged which is more modern than many just because it follows on from long forgotten traditions and has in the process created an astonishing variety.

Number One Potsdamer Platz 1 the 24-storey buidling is called. But there is no doubt, that it is an architectural manifesto.
The tower is the creation of Hans Kollhoff, an architect who recognizes more of modernity in tradition than many of his colleagues. His buildings are full of history. Kollhoff has succeeded in creating a structure that belongs among the highest in the city. In Berlin it counts as a high-rise which permits its roof terrace to be sold as an observation deck. Elsewhere its height would excite no comment.
Anyone taking a stroll through the slender pillars and buttresses will allow his gaze to roam the distance: over to the Debis tower with its green cube or to the Sony complex with its roof in the form of an open umbrella, past the dome of the Reichstag, Germany's new national symbol, and on to the Friedrichstadt where the GSW high-rise with its red and orange textile façade rises distinctively into the air. Anyone who has observed Berlin's new silhouette from the triangular viewing platform feels inspired by all the new impressions, despite their bewildering variety. But it is also the spirit of the building itself which holds the visitor in its spell.
Kollhoff researched deep into history to find the appropriate form for his first high-rise. The architect has constructed a building that plays with abstract elements and through them appeals most expressively to the empathy of the public. While the result may not exactly be a Gothic cathedral the site does possess the magic of those airy towers which mediaeval master builders developed to a state of perfection. Kollhoff's city crown, whose golden prongs are visible from far off in the sunlight creates a unique architectonic drama together with Helmut Jahn's crown of light, which only really comes into force at night: here the tradition-conscious cube, seemingly built by hand brick by brick; there the distraught half-cylinder whose bending façade seems as if it will shatter rather than last.
The rivals stand silently beside one another, as if they had nothing to say to each other. Yet glass tower and brick tower are manifestos in the form of buildings. Through their form and materials they strike opposing architectonic poses which together with two-dozen newly-constructed buildings have transformed Potsdamer Platz into a catwalk of architectonic fashions. Against this newly-built set the architects can present their theories.

The evolution of form
Aesthetic qualities are as a rule measured against experience. In other words, the more that people theorise and debate about art forms, the wider, ultimately, the area of society touched by a feeling for beauty. This is also true for architecture which if it is to have a long-term presence in the city must be able to stand up to the scrutiny of public opinion. Although architects leave their stamp on the cityscape like no other professional body, the concept of form is for the most of them taboo. Beauty, as many architects openly confess, should always be a result and never a goal. The notion that form is an integral component of architecture alongside function and construction is becoming increasingly marginalized. At the same time the architect is the one person in the building process primarily responsible for beauty. Yet because form has been increasingly misappropriated as a political symbol in the course of architectural history there is today scarcely any differentation made between aesthetic and ideological form. In the middle of the 19th century Gottfried Semper once compared the development of architectonic form with evolution. As with natural science, harmony, eurythmics, proportion and symmetry emerged mutually out of one another. Beauty, as the architect and theorist added, should be a combining of single elements to produce a total effect. The abstract form generated from new materials, construction methods and a desire to produce art should for this reason never be left to chance. Beauty, function and strength must always be thought of together. If we transfer the thoughts of the evolutionist Semper to the architecture of today, we would have to fully admit that previously unknown forms with comparable static strength can be realized in architecture through computer-assisted design methods. In an age when the perfection of nature through the exertion of artificial influences presents the greatest scientific challenge, one can fully comprehend these ideas. Although architecture is currently passing through a phase of transformation one must continue to oppose a dissolution of a traditional canon of form. For if architecture is to be completely cut off from its artistic evolution - the computer consequently acting as a kind of gene manipulator of architecture - the loss of form is unavoidable. Form would then no longer be a combining of elements in Semper's sense but would rather be subject to the desire to reproduce itself as if in a retort. It would help itself, as if in a genetic laboratory, to the selected genetic make-up of its ancestors. But such an architecture has no capability to independently develop further, but rather like seedless fruit, which admittedly marks the triumph of science over nature, has in evolutionary terms come to a dead end. It is so stylized or self-fixated that it can never be extended or thought through without giving up its form. This affects, in its intellectual claims, the unique building housing the Jewish Museum as much as the colourful Photonik centre in Adlershof or the children-oriented Heinz Galinski school in Westend. All of these designs whether the philosophical zig-zag form, the organic curve or the three-dimensional translation of a drawing of a sunflower undoubtedly demonstrate a highly creative quality. However, given the context in which they exist, they appear as alien elements.

Berliner Streitkultur
Like no other city in Germany Berlin was the stage on which the architectural debates of the 90s were acted out. Nowhere else do the different types of "new" architecture stand in such contradiction to each other while at the same time inspiring one another as on the Spree. Their mutual presence in the town acts as a constant provocation and the quarrels about their construction are still clearly reverberating around the foyers of the buildings. The ideologies are sometimes so deeply entrenched that one could believe that it was a matter of personal enmity or envy at having missed out on a major project to a colleague. Architects have been known to publicly abuse one another unrestrainedly as, in trivial cases cowboys and indians or more furiously as concrete "block heads" or destroyers of the city. And when the arguments had run out of steam in terms of content it often happened that people would resort to saying that the Nazis would have built in just such a monumental fashion with such a contempt for humanity. Yet beneath all the polemics which made early 90s Berlin an arena for architectural strife, sound theoretical positions were hidden. They could, to grossly simplify the situation, be reduced to the question of whether a building should be integrated into its urban context or whether it should be presented as an autarkic structure in the city. When architects theorized about such concepts as space, wall or materials, it was a pleasant but rare exception. The Berlin debate which was conducted in the arts' sections of regional newspapers and on the podiums of public events led architecture to become a cultural touchstone for the capital. The publicly conducted critical debate of an otherwise closed architecture community created a level of consciousness which provoked even tourists to think about Berlin's cityscape. However, these architects, through their diametrically opposed hostilities, contributed to the feeling that architecture has something to do with good and evil. Every attentive newspaper reader must have gained the impression that architects today either want to recreate the city of the 19th century by using "fascist" stone or build the metropolis of the 21st century with "democratic" glass. One could almost have thought that the happiness of a society rests solely on the shoulders of architects and what thay are building in the city. The "Battle for the reconstruction of Berlin" represented the polemical zenith of a culture of dispute which had been developing since the beginning of modernism. The hostility between traditionalists and modernists played a central role in this. This was particularly true when new materials were developed in the course of history which spurred architects on to the creation of a new formal vocabulary. Nowhere more so than in the first third of the 20th century when industrial production methods revolutionized architecture, for instance the use of glass. Enormous glass walls and as a result much brighter interiors were no longer fiction. But even as early as the 20s the debate suffered from materials being used for ideological purposes. Bruno Taut the architect who, in his theories on "alpine architecture" expressed the belief that the traditional city would disappear, inveighed against his colleagues despite creating one of Berlin's most successful suburban developments through his Hufesiensiedlung (an estate in the form of a horse-shoe). What sounds like a nursery rhyme was in fact pure ideology and would still have had currency in Berlin's architecture debate of the 90s.

The search for a Berlin architecture
The debate about a Berlin style of architecture has been marked by an ideological struggle over building materials. In the course of this, stone has become a synonym for a backward-looking view of architecture, while almost every glass building is seen as a cuckoo in the nest of stone. The attempt to develop forms for Berlin's future cityscape based on a critical analysis of the history of building is, even after the removal of the scaffolding, only slowly gaining recognition among architects and critics and - and this could be the most grotesque aspect of the whole debate - is being reviled as being an undemocratic because untransparent view of society. Concepts such as dimension and weight, monument and tradition have been turned into emotive words whose actual architectonic meaning seems to have been lost. Even the term tectonic - an integral part of architectonic - seems to be a provocation. Do stone buildings really, as Bruno Taut claimed back then, make stone hearts. Hardly. After all no one became a glass person in Taut's glass house built for an exhibition in Cologne. For the media-savy public of today this architectonic dispute is still a source of great entertainment. It suits the pro and contra strategy which appeals to the public, which however drives the protagonists to such lengths that they are scarcely permitted to even use the materials favoured by their putative adversaries if they are not to be called turncoats. The Berlin architecture argument, which reached its height between 1993 and 1995, concentrated on the mainly stone façades in the Friedrichstadt, where the first major innercity building project after the collapse of communism was carried out. The focus was centred on the façades because in the block structure of the Friedrichstadt they represent the only connection between the building and the street. The strict block layout of Baroque urban planning has in fact largely survived until today. The architectonic form is aesthetically reduced to its front projecting through ledges an image of bearing a great weight - independent of the constructions and functions hidden behind the façades.
Naked, all the buildings are the same: reinforced concrete with an economical supporting frame with high rooms which are easy to rent out. Only the cladding lends the architecture its individual character which is why subtle differences can only be recognized in the quality of the material or the finishing of its seams: heavy coats made of stone, light metal clothes or transparent glass wraps. Above all it is the fastening of the cladding to the body, in other words the style of clothing, which produces the subtle differences: be it a stuck-on façade, suggesting from the outside the image of solidity, the weaving together of stone and the frame of the building itself, the solidity of constructions using made-to-measure blocks of stone or, in complete contrast, the apparent dissolving of the façade into a transparent negligee. One can see the full consequences of the new Berlin architecture in the Friedrichstadt. One building there is only superficially the same as another with the subtle differences revealed in the details.
From street level the effects of the blocks are typologically almost identical: the building is orientated to the street, possesses a good address, and the façade sharply separates the exterior from the interior. The variety only emerges through how the architects have worked with stone, metal or glass cladding. A walk along Friedrichstrasse resembles a visit to a library of contemporary architectural theory. Beginning on Unter den Linden at the Lindencorso it takes one past the Hofgarten and the Friedrichstadtpassagen and ends at the Kontorhaus at Mohrenstrasse. The way the blocks are formed by the narrow streets could be seen as monotonous. However, from the pedestrian's perspective, when the buildings have finally become clear, we can feel the effects of their game of illusion and reality. Hans Kollhoff's tectonic façade with its added on columns and ledges arouses a sense of mass and solidity. As with nearly all his buildings, Kollhoff has selected a grey cladding for the corner building at Friedrichstrasse and Französische Strasse, whose joints are concealed according to the principle of overlapping or are filled in with a sand-based cement faithful to Goethe's motto that Art does not need to be true but merely appear to be true. While the façade gives an impression of great solidity, it is in reality a mere 3 centimetres thick. A little further to the south, on the corner of Friedrichstrasse and Mohrenstrasse Klaus Theo Brenner has quite consciously decided to reject this appraoch.
Projecting aluminium swords lying between the open joints and acting as a means of keeping them open, lend the stone façade a filigreed and almost elegant character. It looks as if the architect has wrapped a piece of cloth around the massive body of the building, in which the stone and the support mechanism have been woven together like a textile studded with gleaming pearls.
The stone exterior of the building is transformed into a decorated robe whose metallic segments are clearly discernible. While Kollhoff's building draws upon Semper and his cladding theory, in which the façade is presented as an adorned element of the building itself, Brenner's façade appears to be a modern interpretation of Otto Wagner's post office savings bank building in Vienna.

For Wagner, a good hundred years ago, was the first person to combine, visibly, a façade made of thin natural stone with the frame of the building. Wagner achieved a synthesis of technology and structuring in which he defined the formal vocabulary of the age through a combination of elements such as a knowledge of statics, the available tools and aesthetic sensitivity. It can with certainty be concluded from this that new functions and new constructions bring forth new forms. With his screwed-on stone façade Wagner combined an iron construction with a new sensitivity for stone as a building material. Alongside Brenner in 90s Berlin it was above all Josef Paul Kleihues and Max Dudler who perfected this playing with construction and art. Wherever one can see a metal button in a façade of natural stone it is as if these architects have left their calling cards.
Their façades represent the very opposite of Kollhoff's stone wallpaper which merely evokes an image of solidity. In a sense history could really be said to be repeating itself. For Otto Wagner had already revealed the subtle difference between appearance and reality, and by doing so had shown Semper's theory to be incomplete. Semper only dealt with the symbolism of a construction rather than defining the construction itself as the primary architectural cell. Yet because the broad mass of people pay little attention to such nuances, hardly anyone noticed the subtle differences. Instead an attitude prevailed in the city which condemned out of hand all use of natural stone irrespective of how filigreed or subtly it was used. A special role in Berlin's Friedrichstrasse is played by Christoph Mäckler's Lindencorso and Jean Nouvel's Quartier 207, two projects where the choice of building materials demonstrates the kind of divergence in taste encountered nowhere else. Mäckler was the only architect involved with the Friedrichstrasse project to use huge stone blocks thereby giving his design an association with buildings from the 30s. Nouvel built using glass which promptly led to his building being nicknamed the "department store in aspic." In the Lindencorso there are numerous motifs taken from architectural history: massive windows made from sandstone project into the street, a stone-polished roof runs along near the top of the 250 metre long façade.
The building and its 12 centimetre thick limestone façade are so massive that the supports of the arcade threaten to collapse on to the pavement. This vertical force is partially softened, at least visually, by horizontal fluting - a motif from antiquity which Kleihues also used for the buildings flanking the Brandenburg Gate. The Quartier 207 embodies the very antithesis of Mäckler's "façade without an expiry date" as the architect himself likes to call it. Nouvel's glass palace, which like Jahn's Sony Tower only casts off its greyness with the twilight, coming to life as a glowing object, reflects in its shape the traffic which seems to have rounded the corners of the building. Inside, great beams of light penetrate right down into the basement turning the central space into a funnel. The design looked just as fascinating on paper but was unable to achieve its architectonic qualities in reality. On a number of occasions already glass splinters have rained down in front of the façade because a part of that façade has not been able to withstand the tension. Nouvel has thus unintentionally demonstrated where the difference between distinguished maturity and embarrassing failure lies in architecture.

A Berlin idiom
Aesthetic parameters are just as important for architecture as social, economic or ecological considerations. The beauty of a building therefore mustn't be allowed be a mere fudging of all these requirements, form never the result of such a process of decision-making.
Art forms enjoy a right to individuality but, as in nature, are subject to rules. These rules are unwritten and only in architecture do they become visible. The critic Karl Scheffler once said of Berlin that life in the city was founded on a secular efficiency and a practical sobriety. These very qualities can be encountered in many of the projects of the "new Berlin" of today. This is particularly true of the stone-built commercial buildings on Friedrichstrasse.
These buildings demonstrate in an exemplary fashion how change really can comprehend the concept of continuity. In this way the city has renewed itself; it has followed the laws of its genesis and in doing so has built upon what could still be traced of the past. It is then not a copying of the distant past but a basis for a new tradition which will survive into the future. Future generations looking back at the Berlin architecture of the 90s will surely accuse it of having used a too simple formal vocabulary, of being too curt or repetitive. But most of the buildings will be able to turn this reproach to their advantage; the permanence of their form will be one of their major features and only a few buildings will be allowed to disappear from the cityscape.
People will also be in full agreement about the background to the construction of these builings. In an age of political change, when the decision to construct a European city centre had to be made overnight in the midst of the transformation from an industrial to a media society, where environmental pollution is no longer measured by the number of chimney stacks but rather the flood of information, architecture could not have been too solid. Otherwise there would have been an architectural free-for-all in which form would have been downgraded. Ultimately Berlin did not find its new appearance through vehement debates.
Architects did not try to avoid the question of form. Hopefully people will be able to say of the 90s that it sumore than any age in developing a tradition that was not oriented to the past but rather to the future.

Philipp Meuser