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With great joy I am looking forward to a great piece of German Architecture being opened this month in Baltimore: The University of Baltimore's new Peter Angelos Law Center. LEED Platinum, double glass facades, light and bright, innovative and creative: no lederhosen or broodiness as far as the eye can see.
Stefan Behnisch of Stuttgart is the architect, son and heir of
Guenter Behnisch who changed the face of German postwar architecture with his own type of modernism that took the Bauhaus to new levels. Behnisch, the elder came to international fame with his light and airy tent structures for the Munich Olympics in 1972. Behnisch who as a young man had become a U-boat commander at the end of WW II, became soon a devout critic of all the elements that had been the ingredients of Nazi Germany. He countered pomposity, heaviness, authoritarian structures with his own brand of the "lightness of being", namely making buildings as light as possible by reducing materials to their absolute minimums. Transparency was one of his favorite words along with light and sun. He didn't see a building as a sculpture or as an art object but as a shell that needs to show what is going on inside. His energy went initially to making local and regional schools around his Stuttgart office less institutional and more joyous. From there he went on to museums, the Olympics and eventually a new Parliament building in Bonn which was unfortunately obsolete as soon as it was finished when Germany relocated its capital back to Berlin into the old Reichstag, of all places (although nicely refreshed by Norman Foster).
I was taught the Behnisch canon of architecture in my formative years as a professional: In architecture school where Behnisch gave guest lectures and then on the first floor of his offices in Stuttgart Sillenbuch. There, among the typical south German settler houses, he had designed and constructed a glass and metal structure for his studios that followed the massing of the neighbors but was decidedly different, derided by neighbors as the "tin shed". And I didn't even work for Behnisch, I had been hired by an offshoot and early adopter of his style that still operated from his building. Thus, I breathed what was allowed and proper in architecture from my boss and the famous architect "above" whom I could see maneuver his car into the grass paver parking spot on a daily basis. So it came that soon I believed myself that architecture has to be lightweight, bright and happy to be any good.
All this rushed back into my head when I toured the new law school, the result of Baltimore architects Ayer Saint Gross inviting the Stuttgart based Stefan Behnisch to participate in a design competition held by the University for Baltimore in order to obtain the best design for their new Law Center. Against formidable competition from the US and abroad (Safdie, Foster, Perrault), Stefan Behnisch won (in spite or because) of a very low key heavy accented presentation of his design to the jury. ("Ah, those façade renderings really didn't come out right, I shouldn't have brought those")
Behnisch Junior has taken all the beliefs of his dad and intensified the always present streak of "sustainability" and mixed it up with the current state of innovation, and voila! Here, right in front of our good old historic Penn Station we see: transparency, lightness, glass, happy colors, all of it.
Read more http://archplanbaltimore.blogspot.com/2013/04/german-architecture-in-baltimore.html -
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Klaus Philipsen FAIA
Archplan Inc. Philipsen Architects
Baltimore MD
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