Interferences.
Architecture. Germany – France 1800-2000
Marcel Lods, Adolf Bayer, Wiederaufbau Mainz, Bebauungsplan, Unité d’habitation Wallstraße, 1946, NL Bayer \ 40 \\ © Stadtverwaltung Mainz – Stadtarchiv / 3October 2013 — 12January 2014
Deutsches Architekturmuseum DAM,
Schaumainkai 43, Frankfurt am Main,
Ground Floor + 1st Floor
EXHIBITION OPENING:
Wed, 2October 2013, 19.00
PRESS CONFERENCE:
Tue, 1October 2013, 11.00
GUIDED TOURS:
on Saturdays and Sundays 15.00
OPEN:
Tue, Thu — Sun 11.00 — 18.00 \ Wed 11.00 — 20.00
ABOUT THE EXHIBITION / 2
ARRANGEMENT IN NINE SECTIONS / 2
PUBLICATION / 6
COINCIDING PROGRAM / 7
IMPRINT / 8
COMING SOON / CONTACT / 9
INTERFERENCES SHAPE ARCHITECTURE IN GERMANY AND FRANCE
The exhibition presents two centuries of Franco-German relations in architecture and urban development. Based on new, bilateral research it is a joint project by the Musée d’art moderne et contemporain de Strasbourg and Deutsches Architekturmuseum in Frankfurt/Main.
Since 1800, architectural doctrines, structures and urbanist visions have repeatedly also been the focal point of differences of opinion between Germany and France. The exhibition highlights various debates and polemics in a number of stages, beginning with the Napoleonic era, continuing through the industrial age and Modernism, and concluding with present-day united Europe. The show documents the changing passions of the protagonists in both countries, which oscillate between curiosity and admiration, nationalistic confrontation, dialog, and cooperation.
Works by Karl Friedrich Schinkel, Viollet-le-Duc, Friedrich Weinbrenner, Victor Hugo, Fernand Léger, Walter Gropius, Le Corbusier, Ernst-Ludwig Kirchner, Paul Schmitthenner, Georges Candilis, Rob Krier, Jean Nouvel, Dominique Perrault, and many other architects and artists will be on display.
ARRANGEMENT IN NINE SECTIONS
1789-1848: Alternating enthusiasm for Gothic and neo-Classicism
The period between the French Revolution and the July Monarchy of 1830 was one of major political upheavals, which in Germany resulted in a call for national unity. In architectural culture great changes were likewise emerging, with two countervailing movements determining post-1789encounters between German and French architects.
Countless German intellectuals were attracted to Paris, among them young architects who journeyed there to admire and study the buildings or to learn the trade. They included Friedrich Gilly and later on his pupil Karl Friedrich Schinkel. In the départements and vassal states that arose in the wake of the French armies in Germany, engineers and architects planned royal residences and innovative infrastructures in places like Kassel and Mainz. The King of Württemberg commissioned Napoleon’s favorite architects, Percier and Fontaine, whom he also held in high esteem, with a country palace, and Schinkel also referenced their works in his draft for the first museum building in Berlin.
Shortly afterwards a new, Romantic view of medieval castles and Gothic cathedrals gained sway. Cologne was at the heart of this movement, with the completion of the city’s cathedral raised to the status of a national mission. Whether medieval architecture had its origins in Germany or France was also a topic of discussion. It was probably no coincidence that the Basilica of Sainte Clotilde, the first neo-Gothic church in Paris, was built to plans by Franz Christian Gau, who hailed from Cologne.
1848-1870: The dawn of the industrial age
In the years between the European revolutions of 1848 and the 1870-1871 Franco-Prussian War, the face of architecture was shaped, on the one hand, by references to history, and, on the other, by the changes Industrial Revolution made to cities. A new form of architecture emerged, ranging from factories and market halls to department stores and railway stations, developed in response to the requirements of modernization. From 1853 the rebuilding of Paris, conducted by Prefect Georges-Eugène Haussmann at the instigation of Napoleon III himself, erected a new uniform urban landscape on the ruins of the old city. As of the 1860s the plans for extending major German cities, such as James Hobrecht’s proposal for Berlin, took their cue from Paris.
The founding of new architecture faculties at technical universities in Prussia and other German states went hand in hand with a change in the syllabuses, which until then had been based exclusively on model used in the École des Beaux-Arts and the École Polytechnique in Paris – the latter both continued nevertheless to be frequently attended by German students.
By means of experimental construction projects a small group of industrialists and philanthropists en attempted to find solutions to the pressing issue of creating dwellings for the mass of workers. The ideal of the phalanstère as developed by Charles Fourier and Victor Considérant inspired a number of quite unusual projects, such as Wilhelm Stier’s proposal for a city of the poor Berlin or the familistère built by the factory owner Jean-Baptiste Godin in Guise.
1870-1900: The new notion of a nation and new urban life
The 1870-1871 war had a dramatic impact on architecture and urban planning. The founding of the German Reich, symbolically proclaimed in the Hall of Mirrors in Versailles, strengthened Berlin’s role and resulted in the spectacular growth of the cities in the new nation. The territory of Alsace-Lorraine annexed by the Reich, in particular Strasbourg and Metz, saw ambitious urban development projects get under way.
The war also left its mark on the architecture of memorials. Auguste Bartholdi created the most important French monument in the form of the Lion of Belfort. In Berlin, Franz Schwechten built the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church, and throughout the Reich hundreds of monuments dedicated to Kaiser Wilhelm I or his chancellor Bismarck arose.
At the same time the new Reich’s architecture very much followed French tastes. Urban renewal in Haussmann’s vein, which for a long time continued to serve as a model for many cities in the Reich, gradually began to wane in favor of urban forms that blended with their surroundings, whereby the tenement apartment blocks continued to form their centers.
History, forever present in the architects’ approaches, became a starting point for far-reaching monument preservation strategies. Viollet-le-Duc completed the restoration of Château de Pierrefonds, regarding it as a lesson in rationalism. At roughly the same time albeit in a manner that was imaginative but based more strongly on the results of scientific research, Bodo Ebhardt attempted to convert the ruin of the castle at Haut-Koenigsbourg into a symbolic residence in Alsace for the German Kaiser.
1900-1914: The culture of reform and the new aesthetics
Under the pressure of the social movements, and on account of the endeavors of a new generation of writers, artists, and architects, the turn of the century saw a change in big-city culture and architecture. At the same time the cross-fertilization of an extremely wide range of movements, forms, and discourses intensified. In the years leading up to the World War I, Friedrich Nietzsche’s works reached France, while in Germany Henri Bergson’s ideas met with keen interest.
New urban planning strategies were developed in response to the population being concentrated in the cities and to the issue of how to guarantee people’s welfare. The first examples of the garden city concept adopted from Great Britain were in Hellerau, nr. Dresden, and in Stockfeld on the outskirts of Strasbourg, as well as later in Staaken, nr. Berlin, and elsewhere.
Exhibitions helped advance the exploration of the architectural language of monumental structures. Max Berg’s 1913 “Jahrhunderthalle” in Breslau (now Wroclaw, Poland) was to a certain extent meant as a riposte to the 1889 Machine Hall in Paris and to François Hennebique and Auguste Perret’s first concrete buildings in the city.
In Paris, with his gallery art dealer Siegfried Bing changed the face of the French cultural scene as did critic Julius Meier-Graefe with his magazines. At the Paris World Exposition in 1900 and later at the Salon d’Automne in 1910, German arts and crafts exhibited not only audacious shapes that marked a break with historicism, but also previously unknown forms of cooperation between art and industry, which the German Werkbund, founded in 1907, had consciously supported.
1914-1939: Competing Modernisms
During World War I reinforced concrete was put to new uses in military structures, while standardization in construction was advanced. In France, the destruction of numerous monuments triggered heated nationalistic debates and after the War turned cities like Reims into urban development testing grounds.
Both countries attentively followed the different paths their respective variants of architectural Modernism took. In Paris, the domination of the École des Beaux-arts went unchallenged, whereas the Bauhaus tried out new training methods. In 1927, the German Werkbund, which in 1925 was not yet able to participate in the 1925 Exposition des arts décoratifs (an arts and crafts exhibition) in Paris, attracted enormous interest with the Weissenhof residential estate in Stuttgart, and in 1930 made a real splash at the Salon des Artistes décorateurs in Paris. At the 1937 World Exposition in Paris Albert Speer’s German Pavilion seemed to be squaring up not only to its Soviet counterpart but even to the Eiffel tower itself.
After the War, fighting the housing shortage required great efforts. Whereas in Germany in the 1920s state-of-the-art residential estates were built in most cities, reconstruction in France tended to follow the garden city idea. As such it was several years before the sort of housing estates built in Frankfurt and Berlin began influencing housing construction in the periphery of Paris. In a climate of chauvinism, which had become even greater than before World War I, trade journals emerged as an outstanding medium for the exchange of ideas and formal approaches thanks to articles by dedicated critics, who in some cases could be termed veritable double agents.
1939-1949: Occupation and reconstruction
The defeat of France led in 1940 to the renewed annexation of Alsace-Lorraine by the Third Reich. A competition was staged for the creation of a Greater Strasbourg to serve as the capital of a new Reich province straddling both sides of the Rhine, in the former Département Moselle, where the French-speaking part of the population had been deported, architects from Germany such as Emil Steffann and Rudolf Schwarz planned the reconstruction of villages that had been destroyed, and the modernization of the industrial region.
Unlike the four-year Nazi occupation of France, the equally short period of time between Germany’s capitulation and the founding of the two German states in 1949 was particularly rich in contacts and projects. With regard to the showcase construction projects in the French occupation zone and the Saar region, Marcel Lods and Georges-Henri Pingusson brought the sort of design models into play that Le Corbusier had developed for Saint-Dié, the former for Mainz, the latter for Saarbrücken.
Despite the enormous efforts on the part of the French to spread the principles of functionalist urban planning and to organize study trips to French reconstruction projects for German architects, the projects were torpedoed by members of the French military and rejected by the local population. Despite the fact that most of the plans drawn up in this period were thus never actually realized, their echo was felt for many years to come.
1949-1961: Modernization, dialogue, and exhibitions
In the 12 years between the founding of the two German states in 1949 and the building of the Berlin Wall in 1961, West Germany and East Germany both referenced France with regard to industrializing construction efforts. As with the “ZUP”, the special building zones on city outskirts that were prioritized from 1953 in France, the French Camus prefabrication system was used in both German states when constructing major housing developments.
In 1957, the “Interbau” international building exhibition was held in West Berlin: The organic, flowing urban designs it emphasized were intended to be showcase the free world, as opposed to the straight grid lines that spawned Stalinallee in East Berlin. The following year the French entry for the international “Berlin – Capital City” competition, which called for designs for the hypothetical capital of a reunited Germany, was more extensive than that of any other nation.
It was primarily in church architecture that the cases of interaction in this period found lasting expression. French trade journal L’Art sacré discussed the emergency churches designed by the German architects Otto Bartning and Emil Steffann, while, commissioned by Egon Eiermann, master glass maker Gabriel Loire designed the blue window walls for the new Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church being built among the ruins of its predecessor. Jean-Charles Moreux was commissioned to design the Church of St. Ansgar in Hamburg, another instance of the impact of the network that had formed between the protagonists of modern church building.
1961-1989: Crisis in New Building and the rediscovery of urbanity
While more and more students opted to expand their horizons by attending courses in the neighboring country, new buildings were emerging from overlapping activities, for example the German building for the Cité Universitaire in Paris by Johannes Krahn and his works for French cultural institutes in Germany, the university library in Bonn designed jointly by Pierre Vago and Fritz Bornemann, and Erich Schelling’s CERN center in Grenoble. The collaboration between architect Werner Ruhnau and painter Yves Klein for the design of the music theater in Gelsenkirchen is without doubt unique.
With regard to the large-scale housing estates, many of which had now been built, the parallel development of prior years persisted. The model dominant hitherto in both France and Germany became almost simultaneously the subject of criticism. There was a call for more flexible solutions, albeit without questioning industrial mass production. The response to the satellite town of Toulouse-Le Mirail was so positive that the planners, the architects Georges Candilis, Alexis Josic and Shadrach Woods, were invited to take part in several competitions in West Germany before ultimately landing the contract to build a new building at the Free University in Berlin. At the same time, in Paris the German Martin Schulz van Treeck completed his spectacular “Orgues de Flandres” project in the redevelopment area in the 19th arrondissement.
The renewed interest in urbanity led to a call for more compact cities and more varied architecture, to which the program of the International Architecture Exhibition (IBA) in Berlin responded. Between 1979 and 1987 exemplary buildings were constructed for the exhibition, the theme of which was inner-city living.
1989 to the present: At the heart of a new Europe
The two decades following German reunification were marked by even greater international mobility. Several French architects, for example Jean Nouvel, Dominique Perrault, and Claude Vasconi, were involved in the urban design of the now united city of Berlin. Other International Architecture Exhibitions followed the successful Berlin model and had a remarkable influence on French urban planning policy. This is particularly the case as regards the Emscher Park IBA with its exemplary restructuring of the extensive moribund industrial areas along the banks of the River Ruhr.
Today, architecture, urban development, and landscape planning in both countries reciprocally influence each other to a quite unprecedented degree. Finn Geipel’s work and his intermittent collaboration with Nicolas Michelin in France is a prime example of this trend. While, going the other way, landscape planner Henri Bava’s studio TER is now active in several German cities.
Places for interaction between the regions have emerged on both sides of the border, the importance of which is steadily dwindling. The urban development plans of Strasbourg, which in cooperation with the town of Kehl extend across the Rhine, are definitely a model of cross-border collaboration. This was symbolized by the “Garden on Two River Banks”, which was laid out for the 2004 State Horticultural Show, in which Marc Mimram’s footbridge served as the central link forged between the two countries.
PUBLICATION
/ InterferenzenInterférences
Architektur.
Deutschland – Frankreich 1800–2000
Jean-Louis Cohen, Hartmut Frank (ed.)
Texts: Barry Bergdoll, Andreas Beyer, Anne-Marie Châtelet, Jean-Louis Cohen, Hartmut Frank, Christian Freigang, Wolfgang Voigt, Christiane Weber, Volker Ziegler and others
around 468 pageswith 330 coloured images, 23 x 28 cm. Hardcover
ISBN: 978 3 8030 0770 4
At the Museum: Euro 39,-
Book stores: Euro 49,90
Sat/Sun, 3 p.m. Open guided tours by Yorck Förster;
admission to the museum EUR 9Euro/ EUR 4,50 reduced , will not begin until 5 October
30 October 2013, 19.00—21.00
Lecture/Admission 5,- EUR:
Siedlung und Grand Ensemble. Tendenzen des Wohnungsbaus in Frankreich und Deutschland
DW Dreysse, Frankfurt and Volker Ziegler, Straßburg
5 November 2013, 19.00—21.00
Lecture/Admission 5,- EUR:
Kaiserpalast, Universität, Kirchen, Gauhalle: Deutsche Architekten in Straßburg 1871—1945
Laus Nohlen, Straßburg and Wolfgang Voigt, DAM
7 November 2013, 9.00—20.00
Day trip with Bus:
Straßburg zwischen den Baukulturen Deutschlands und Frankreichs
Guided by: Wolfgang Voigt, DAM; Klaus Nohlen and Volker Ziegler, Straßburg
13 November 2013, 19.00—21.00
Lecture/Admission 5,- EUR:
Kölnische Neugotik in Paris, Versailles in Bayern. Deutsch-französische Interferenzen im 19. Jahrhundert
Mario Kramp, KölnandChristoph Hölz, München\Innsbruck
27 November 2013, 19.00—21.00
Lecture/Admission 5,- EUR:
Bauten und Projekte in Deutschland und Frankreich. Planen ohne Grenzen?