“Luisenblock West”: The new office building of the Bundestag in Berlin – culture

The German Bundestag suffers from obesity. There are 736 members in this largest freely elected parliament in the world. Which among other things means that 736 MPs claim 736 offices in Berlin-Mitte. That means, apart from thousands of Tolomeo table lamps, and with a view of the 18-square-meter standard office in the Jakob-Kaiser-Haus: 736 times 18 times 3, because each member of the parliament is given at least three rooms – that’s almost 40,000 square meters. Putin gets by on less than half of his alleged palace on the Black Sea. Okay, the Crimea is on top of that. The Bundestag domesticated by a traffic light, that is a laudable contribution to world peace, does without any other annexations.

For this reason alone, the news of the recently completed new “Luisenblock West” building is good news. Finally, the members of the obese Bundestag no longer have to eke out their diet in dark corridors between copiers and moving boxes. About this building, designed by the Berlin office Sauerbruch Hutton Architects, there are other positively surprising things to note.

For example, the cost of 70 million euros was adhered to, which marks an outrageous anomaly in Berlin’s building tradition. The deadline for completion after only 20 months of planning and construction time, now it is finally going to be magical, was even four weeks short. Four weeks less instead of a minimum of four years more – as is actually the custom in Berlin.

It is desirable that the population now and then get to see working MPs

The seven-storey building, which was handed over at the end of December and rises up next to the “Band des Bundes” and is climate-friendly, prefabricated from wooden modules, forms two courtyards on an H floor plan. A glass wall offers on the one hand noise protection and on the other hand an idea of ​​transparency towards the S-Bahn. It is desirable that the population now and then get to see working MPs, who are often missed in the plenary hall.

Incidentally, in view of the disrespect with which the actors in politics are currently being shot at, one is glad for every woman and every man who makes themselves available to democracy. They deserve good jobs – even if there might not be as many as there are seats in the gymnasium and festival hall in Ehningen near Böblingen. Exactly 736. If the Bundestag does not finally slim down as resolutely as Reiner Calmund by the next election, Ehningen will please become the federal capital.

One could continue to talk about energy efficiency, recyclability and the blessings of temporary, demountable architecture. After all, the building, in a serially organized manner, i.e. manufactured like a car in a factory, serves the Bundestag administration as a temporary measure. For 15 years. But what really interests you here is what is most natural at first glance: the building is colored.

Matthias Sauerbruch says: “Both governance and the fight against climate change are serious matters, so it is all the more important to offer places for this work that remind us of the diversity and beauty of life.” The fact that the serious can also look light and the heavy can even look elegant: This is also thanks to the colored facade made of recycled aluminum sheet as weather protection for the wood.

On the one hand, this is logical for a House of Representatives, because color is part of political business as a cipher. As far as possible all MPs should be able to find each other again. (To be frank: a lot of bright blue, politically possibly a contradiction in terms, cannot be found in the color ballet on the Spree. Black is also more likely to be found in the opposition than in the color scheme.) That the new building by Sauerbruch Hutton is a contribution Regarding the color architecture is: That is remarkable – even if it sounds like the news that BMW builds cars or that Karl Lauterbach is on television.

There are worlds between colourfulness as an expression of clever design and any kind of colourfulness

Nevertheless, it must finally be made clear that colourfulness and colourfulness are not the same. There are worlds in between. One is clever design, the other is an indiscriminate grip in the paint box. In this respect, the building at the traffic light present is also an occasion to pay tribute to Sauerbruch Hutton as a co-inventor of colorful modernism. Right now, at a time when the increasing colorfulness in architecture and urban planning is driving the color faction back into despair. Because the one, the increasingly colorful, is an identification of often screamingly loud arbitrariness. The other, which is still rarely colored, is a contribution to building culture.

You can also find one in Munich’s museum district, for example. If you stroll north along the concrete-gray facade of the Pinakothek der Moderne, you suddenly find yourself in front of the Brandhorst Museum with its facade made of brightly colored ceramic rods. Even the gray, wet December days come to an astonishing end here.

It’s not that the sun is rising now. You are also not at the end of the rainbow. And yet you suddenly find yourself in front of an architecture that almost embraces you. That blows away dark thoughts of the pandemic and the social situation that gives you a smile, as well as cheerfulness and beauty. And color. Lots of color. Beautiful colors, intense colors. A green, a purple, a yellow, an orange, a red, a blue. In the new Eberhofer thriller, Susi cannot decide between Super White and Crystal White in terms of tile technology. One would like to show her the way – instead of to the hardware store – to the Brandhorst Museum.

Building is not only an art of form, but also of color

This color range was also designed by Sauerbruch Hutton. Years ago. These are architects who repeatedly create renaissance-like and at the same time contemporary moments of reanimation for the sensuality-withdrawal coma of the modern age. It’s about remembering that building is not just an art of form, but also an art of color; that the world, if it succeeds in architectural and urban space, is always a colorful, even stimulatingly beautiful and sensually comprehensible world. This realization in a time that tends more and more to the colorless banality on the one hand or to the deliriously misunderstood, glaring colourfulness on the other hand, is thanks to the Sauerbruch Hutton office. For their architecture, color is not an option, but a core element.

Open detailed view

In Venice, but not where the old town waits for tourists from ship’s bellies, but where the staff of the lagoon stage play Venice really lives, in Mestre on the mainland, is until February an exhibition by the Sauerbruch Hutton office to see with works from 30 years. The museum quarter in Mestre itself, M 9, was also planned by the office as a vitalizing, intensely colored cardiac pacemaker.

The show “draw love build” shows the main themes that connect the architectures and urban spaces that have been created over the decades. These are, for example, the post-industrial city, which pioneered the importance of sustainability and energy efficiency – but above all: the desire to create houses that are also sustainable because, as Louisa Hutton says in Mestre, “people love them.” can”.

Incidentally, the fact that the word “love” appears in a contemporary architecture exhibition is as rare as building projects in Berlin that don’t get out of hand.

It is a blatant misunderstanding that modernism since Bauhaus and Le Corbusier has come along in the guise of the overused color white. The Bauhaus masters were at the same time those of color. The use of color was also a matter of course for the ancestors of modernity, from Sullivan to Wright to Le Corbusier. Just like in antiquity, the temples of which, as we now know, testify to their richly colored, splendid design.

The non-color white became a symbol of everything that wanted to be “new” in the modern cityscape

Dyes, similar to textile history, were expensive in the early history of construction and therefore later reserved for representation, such as “Schönbrunn Yellow”, for example, have become more accessible since industrialization. But this is hardly reflected in modern cityscapes. Not only the formally overflowing historicism, but also the colourfulness of the past, as Tom Wolfe complained in retrospect about the Bauhaus, should give way to an ideology of “bright & bright & pure & fine”. A non-color, white, became symbolic of everything that wanted to be “new”.

In addition, it was cheaper to do without color concepts, while ironically, as less-is-more dogma, you could turn the renunciation into added value again. In this way, the houses became increasingly poor in terms of design ambition and, now looking like cardboard-gray shoe boxes, more and more popular. So more expensive. Nothing became socially acceptable.

When Louisa Hutton and Matthias Sauerbruch founded their soon to be international work 30 years ago, the recapture of color was important from the start. In doing so, they do not use the options from the paint box, which can hardly be distinguished from colorful arbitrariness, but derive their color concepts from the location and the different meanings of the rooms. In their thinking, color is linked to task, context, form and construction. They want a holistic grammar based on color and Form aims as a unit. Not about randomly colorful fashion.

After the woodchip wallpaper era, since color has long been used again, occasionally looking as starved as after years of a relentless color diet, more and more color embarrassments are also suitable to make others feel ashamed. Colourfulness instead of colourfulness, arbitrary instead of conceptual, fashionable instead of permanent: soon, desperate, you will resort to woodchip wallpaper again. So it is good to be reminded on the occasion of the new parliamentary offices in Berlin that color should go hand in hand with responsibility and skill. Not only in the political, but also in the architectural space.