Brutalism in Nuremberg – eyesore or good architecture? – Bavaria

The most beautiful view of Nuremberg? Is explicitly advertised to tourists when walking on the western city wall. Last but not least, young people don’t need to be told twice, but the view over Tiergärtnertorplatz is also really Instagrammable: on the left the Kaiserburg, in front of it several of the most representative half-timbered houses of the formerly free imperial city, pointed gables, cobblestones and in the center of the picture a bratwurst vendor. On the right-hand side, the Albrecht Dürer House completes the praised motif, for many the Altnürnberg building par excellence. That would be worth investigating: How many of the selfies sent from there into the world include the cube-like extension of the Dürer house. One percent might be too high. Who wants pure brutalism on the postcard?

It’s a pity really, because looking at this cube can fill you with awe. How courageous, conflict-ready and committed to modernity must have been a time that dared to put such a building on the painter’s workshop of the German master? And that quite consciously in preparation for a round anniversary of this master, the 500th birthday of Dürer. In the late 1960s, Nuremberg dared this architectural counterpoint, rigorously, and certainly aware that it would be too rigorous for many. The extension was then also given the charming word “art transformer”, which, given the contrast, could have turned out worse. The extension now houses the “Dürersaal”, in which copies of paintings from four centuries are shown, each based on Albrecht Dürer’s models. Ironically, in that maximum architectural antithesis to the master’s workshop, copies of his art can be seen – not a completely misguided irony of history.

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What the view over the Tiergärtnertor can definitely teach you: Nuremberg, this European center at the transition from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance, has rebuilt many old things in the decades after the Second World War. Especially in the 1960s and 1970s, however, new ventures were also dared and by no means only on the outskirts of the city. Compared to other buildings, the extension to the Dürer house was more of a brutalist dwarf, albeit one in the old town’s “place to be”. None of these designs was entirely undisputed: neither the extension to the Johannes-Scharrer-Gymnasium nor the residential complex on the northern edge of the city park. Anyone who asks what is perhaps Nuremberg’s ugliest large building will hear the term “Norishalle” with some regularity – a massive and gray block on the edge of the old town, inaugurated in 1969. At that time it housed the state trade institute, today the city archivists are housed there.

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They are aggressively dealing with the history of the building, and the exhibition “Concrete. Space. Art. Architecture and Sculpture in Nuremberg” can be seen in the building these days. Works will be shown by artists who have dedicated themselves to concrete as a building material: Tobias Rempp, Dominik Schoell, Robert Scholz. Arnold Otto, head of the city archives, also does not hide the fact that for some brutalist building was and is style-defining, quite a few speak of “concrete block” or even “disgrace”. In general, the term “brutalism” conjures up associations of violence, especially as these are not far-fetched, since in Latin “brutus” can not only mean “massive” and “heavy”, but also “sluggish, clumsy, dull” and by the way can also be translated “stupid”. On the other hand, the gallery owner Markus Gramer adds in an introduction to the subject of concrete, it was none other than Le Corbusier who helped Brutalism achieve a breakthrough – and with the French “brut” brought in completely different associations: “A glass of champagne, a rough diamond, an unplastered wall or anything else awaiting eventual finishing is called brut.”

Mayor of Culture Julia Lehner recalls that the competition for the Norishalle already heated up tempers and that the winning design by the architect Heinrich Graber from Fürth had finally sharply divided “the camps”: here enthusiastic supporters of a double pavilion system and ribbon windows, there staunch opponents of this to this day most prominent Nuremberg concrete brutalist building. Some saw (and see) an act of brute – and undisguised – violence at a historic city. The others are an exemplary example of a symbolic new beginning after 1945. The building historian Sebastian Gulden notes that the Nazis in Nuremberg did not demonstratively renounce concrete – a building material not least of the 1920s. However, this was consistently clad with limestone, sandstone or granite in order to preserve an aura of supposed immortality.

In a SZ interview last year on the reconstruction of Bavarian cities after 1945, the monument scientist and architectural historian Carmen Enss prophesied that the brutalism hype that was already rampant in large metropolises like London was likely to spread further. Art Nouveau, too, she observed, was initially demonized, but “after 70 years” “tastes are changing”. As a result, interest in Brutalist building may not have quite reached its peak – and a fate like that of the Church of the Resurrection in the Franconian town of Sailauf does not threaten the Albrecht Dürer extension and the Noris Hall, which has long been a listed building.

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The church – rugged, made of exposed concrete, a classic brutalist building by Emil Mai, a student of Sep Ruf – was demolished in 2009. As with many such buildings, a general renovation would have been necessary in Sailauf after about 40 years (the Norishalle had already been attested to the “risk of crumbling concrete parts” in 1997). However, the Vorspessart apparently did not want a renovation. Only recently has the view prevailed that only this demolition was brutal. Not the construction.