Irrational theatre - Philharmonie in Berlin, Germany

Architectural Review, The, Feb, 1995 by Peter Blundell Jones

Hans Scharoun's masterpiece, the Philharmonie in Berlin, was based on many years of development of the idea of a perspective, democratic space. The Mannheim National Theatre competition entry was a key stage in the evolution of anti-authoritarian planning.

The rebuilding of the Mannheim National Theatre was one of the most important German reconstruction projects following the Second World War. It was a chance for a new start and for a celebration of returning democracy, and although Scharoun's entry was unsuccessful in the competition of 1953,(1) it was one of the most highly regarded, occupying a crucial place in his oeuvre. The competition brief called for new ideas both in relation to the siting of the building and in the development of its performance spaces.(2) Scharoun undertook deep studies in both areas: on the contextual side he and his assistant Alfred Schinz made a 'structural investigation' of the historical growth of the city. A parallel investigation into the history and development of theatre involved discussions with Hugo Haring and culminated in a detailed paper submitted with the project by Haring's assistant Margot Aschenbrenner, who had a literary and philosophical background.(3) The care taken over these texts and over his own description demonstrates only too clearly Scharoun's concern that the social and cultural ideas driving the project - its spiritual intentions - be properly understood.

Site and context

Mannheim was founded in 1606 by Duke Friedrich IV of Pfalz at the confluence of the Rhine and the Neckar, as a grid-planned town within a radial star-like fortification system. The first bridge, over the Neckar, led to the main axial street which culminated at the Rhine in a fortified citadel, though within a century this had been replaced by the ducal Schloss. By the early nineteenth century, the fortifications were obsolete, and as so often in European cities, the wall gave way to a ring-road. Increasing river trade encouraged the building of the port and enlargement of the city. Contained to north and west by rivers, it could only expand to the south-east, where in the late nineteenth century a new grid was laid out, prolonging the cross-axis of the original city. The north-west/south-east axis then became dominant instead of the north-east/south-west one indicating that power had passed from the Duke to the bourgeois merchants. This story was summed up in city plans at century intervals selectively re-drawn by Alfred Schinz.(4)

The city had a preferred site, but competitors were invited to suggest alternatives, and to speculate on the appropriate place for the theatre. Scharoun submitted a pair of city plans showing seven possible sites, one with them ringed the larger, rings marking preferred ones the other as grids or as variants of his proposed design. The grids indicate tight sites within proposed urban blocks where the theatre might be embedded without exterior, but Scharoun felt that such placing would not give sufficient prominence to the building. He also thought it desirable for accessibility to place the building by the ring-road - the border between original city and later suburbs - between the Rhine and the Neckar. The axial site marked Mitte - middle - would have been the most prominent locally, but Scharoun felt that 'national' required connections further afield. The Neckar connected regionally to places such as Worms and Speyer, but the Rhine site would place the theatre on the historic communication axis of Germany, a truly national - and with links to France and Holland even international setting.

Although hoping to transfer to the Rhine site if allowed to develop his proposal, Scharoun prepared his competition design for the city's preferred site on Goetheplatz, and the whole building is so subtly specific that it is hard to imagine it convincingly adapted for another.(5) Goetheplatz lies just outside the east corner of the original city, laid out diagonally in the nineteenth century to maintain a perpendicular relation to the ring-road. It is thus skewed by about 35 degrees to the main grid, an angle-shift which Scharoun chose to exploit. With a stroke of genius, he set the low parts of his theatre parallel to the square, but he placed the seven-storey block linking the two fly-towers with workshops and dressing rooms diagonally in alignment with the adjacent grid. The borderline position on the old fortifications and the historic transition of geometry were dramatised in the new building form, and the transition was also ingested by the building to inform its internal spaces, the complete asymmetry which Scharoun wanted for his 'aperspective' theatre being greatly facilitated by the angle shift.

Two theatres were required, large and small, which are placed at opposite ends and on opposite sides of the diagonal central tract. The large theatre occupies the major end of the site next to the ring-road, its corner entrance and superimposed bill-board facing south-west towards the city centre. The small theatre projects at the east end, forming a dynamic corner with the skewed road from the Neckar bridge. The south of the building is its most public side, addressing the square with both theatre entrances, a restaurant and several shops. The north side in contrast is a back, with big north light windows to its workshops and an industrial-looking chimney from the underground boiler. It opens onto a sunken court for service and parking, but with an underpass to the low-lying Luisenpark beyond to the cast. The building acknowledges its context in a very detailed way, and its massing is suitably assertive in the largely five-storey context. The decision to integrate offices, dressing-rooms, workshops and other such elements into a regular multi-storey block a straight piece of Modern architecture - provides an effective foil for the wildly irregular theatre-bodies and gives the building an appropriately urban character.(6) This tract was to be crowned with a roof-top restaurant and a series of rehearsal rooms whose projecting forms reflect their internal order - little theatres, special in shape like the big ones, signalling their presence across the rooftops of the city.(7)