Capital Dilemma: Germany's Search for a New Architecture of Democracy - Review

Architectural Review, The, April, 1999 by Colin Davies

By Michael Z. Wise. New York: Princeton Architectural Press. 1998. [pounds]18.95

The authors of these books are both American and both from non-architectural backgrounds. Andrea Kupfer Schneider is a lawyer with a special interest in the management of conflict, and Michael Z. Wise is a political journalist. They therefore view their European architectural subject matter, as it were, from a safe distance both geographically and professionally. Their objective stance might be seen as an advantage but, for the architectural reader, this is cancelled out by their lack of enthusiasm for architecture as architecture. In fact it is not clear exactly what their motives were for undertaking these thorough but somewhat inconclusive investigations.

Perhaps the last chapter of Creating the Musee d'Orsay offers a clue. After an exhaustive examination of this controversial project - its political ambiguities (initiated by the conservative Giscard d'Estaing but realized by the socialist Francois Mitterrand), its artistic uncertainties (did nineteenth-century salon art really deserve a museum of its own?) and its architectural compromises (the designer, Gae Aulenti, seems to have had little respect for the disused railway station she was asked to convert) - Schneider concludes that 'the creation of an American museum such as the Orsay would be close to impossible'. So this isn't about France, it's about America. Perhaps it is a criticism of the lack of state patronage of the arts in the US. But if so, Schneider never actually comes out and says so.

Capital Dilemma is a much more satisfying read, mainly because of its broader historical sweep but also because it concentrates on one major theme - the agonies suffered by the German government in coming to terms with both its Nazi and its communist architectural legacies. The problem is well illustrated by two buildings: Gunther Behnisch's open, transparent, determinedly democratic Bundestag in Bonn, completed in 1992; and its successor, the bombastically Classical, Norman Foster-converted Reichstag in Berlin. There could be no clearer architectural expression of the sea change that has taken place in German politics. In Germany the political symbolism of architecture really matters and Wise makes us see exactly why. But there is a big blind spot in Wise's analysis. He chooses to examine only government sponsored buildings and has almost nothing to say about the recent large scale commercial redevelopment of Berlin. Endless arguments over the tactful conversion of Goering's Aviation Ministry building or the possible preservation of East Germany's Palace of the Republic are surely less important now than the behemoths rising from the new Potzdamer Platz under the banners of Sony and Daimler Benz. But then historians often fail to see what is closest to them. Perhaps the way that these buildings clearly symbolize the triumph of multi-national capitalism is not apparent from an American viewpoint.

COLIN DAVIES