Munchin' in München

MUNICH.

Just a few days after departing Frankfurt, still in an inspired daze from the experiential overload the Deutsches Architekturmuseum's exhibit on building models, I was walking the streets of Munich, but still imagining miniature landscapes of ancient Pompeii or the visionary fantasy of Isozaki's metabolist metropolis.

One of the best models, as I mentioned in the post about the exhibit, was the square slice of mid-town Manhattan, bustling with traffic. This realistic rectangle of real estate was dominated firstly by the iconic Chrysler Building, but also by the MetLife building, the bulky brutalist block which has been featured on Bauzeitgeist before when reviewing an excellent book about the building.

Aside from my admiration for the old Pan Am Building, the much-hated "Monster that Ate Park Avenue," the area around Ground Center Station in New York is of particular fondness to me as it was the old location of the headquarters office for the company that I work for, and it was from my office window that I could look out at the MetLife, the Chrysler, and the station at about the same height as the viewer of the model at the Frankfurt museum.

It was therefore startling to encounter the familiar mass of the MetLife. A window of a jeweler in a fashionable street near the Frauenkirche featured a model of midtown, with the Metlife Building broadly featured, a cutout of the archways of the Grand Central at its feet. "MetLife" had been changed to MetLove, but otherwise the old Pan Am had been faithfully recreated--the Chrysler was not included in the scene. As surprised as I was to see a miniature of the building twice in a week in two different German cities, its remarkable that the much-derided building is here used as a recognizable symbol of New York.

Such careful imitations, even if intended for the utility of accurate depiction, nonetheless seem to yield to some begrudging admiration of the building. I thought about this curious near-irony when looking at the large model of the Grand Central Area at the museum in Frankfurt.

As much as the Pan Am has been long loathed, the dark-bronze Hyatt Hotel to the immediate east of Grand Central Station has been attacked by architects as being equally hideous: critics trot out the old box-the-nearby-masterpiece-came-in trope and decry the reflective-brown skin, which enclosed the old hotel when Trump rescued it from bankruptcy in 1980. 

Looking at the Hyatt from a helicopter height, however, even if its is really on a 2nd-floor gallery of a German museum, I could help but admire the care that the model maker had put into accurately assembling the mannequin, and how nice it looked amongst the other buildings of the area, and how little I had paid attention to the building in those days when I was in and out of an office tower across the street.

Gefühl von Nürnberg

Leaving Frankfurt behind, heading southward. Romantic Bavaria in high summer: handsome, historic hamlets surrounded by deep green under glorious skies. Even its larger cities, such as Würzburg and Nürnberg, hold incredible swaths of antique buildings.

The crooked rooflines of the towns, large and small, are dotted with dozens of dormer windows. The angled sweep of the streetscape is interrupted by the punctures and perforations of eave line fenestration. Some fanciful houses have so many that the roof seems more proud facets than smooth slopes, dark shadows formed by the midday sun like features of a face.

 The jagged pattern of so many little dormers is distinct, making the already-mesmerizing vantage point of the ancient imperial castle of Nürnberg just a bit more wonderful. Looking out over a Holy Roman hamlet of half a million, its history and heritage intact, only the high-rises on the hillsides remind the viewer of the present-day.

Down below, in a small square near the town hall, is a bronze model of the old city, its metallic ridges warmed in the sunlight, and its rooftops lightened to brass from human touches.

The dormer windows are there, moulded on to the tops of many of the little model buildings. Only here and there; perhaps they've been worn away elsewhere by so many hands. But the model conveys the abundance of this detail on the actual structures.

But no, they're not little knobs of windows; it is language. It was not architectural accuracy on the part of the metalworker, but instead writing. Braille. The model is for use by the blind, also: to take in the city through the fingertips, to feel its arrangement, its alleys, its expanse. Does the reader know how that these bumps are also on the real rooftops, that the full-size buildings are so heavy with raised dots?

All images ©2011 Bauzeitgeist

Frankfurt und Anderswo

FRANKFURT AM MAIN.

Journalists have employed the term "Mainhattan"regularly over the last two decades to describe Frankfurt, ostensibly due its thicket of high-rise financial towers that has risen across the west-end of the city. Frankfurt's American-style "downtown" skyline, began rising in the mid-1970s, never 'exploding' so much as growing bit by bit, as it does today. Frankfurt looked remarkably different from any other European city.

Although somewhat renown in the recent past as the most substantial skyline of continental Europe, this hyperbolic moniker's impact has diminished as European skyscrapers became less unusual, and especially as European skyscrapers have become more common, such as post-1990s Rotterdam or Warsaw, much less when considered against the hundreds of formally-flat cityscapes from Doha to Shenzhen which today appear as a shimmering walls of highrises.

Top: southeastern Frankfurt: The Romer, the Main Plaza, the ECB Tower

Bottom: Central-East Frankfurt, the Zeil Hochhaus and Jumeirah Hotel at Left, the ECB at far right.

©2012 Bauzeitgeist.

Not that anyone besides journalists and architectural enthusiasts have ever used the term "Mainhattan," But to at any point call Frankfurt's small cluster of not-particularly-tall buildings a peer to New York's miles-wide skyline was always ridiculously overblown. A more appropriate, if less cosmopolitan, reference would be to a similarly-sized and shaped American city. Frankfurt's skyline was never more substantial or impressive than the elevation of downtown Pittsburgh or Nashville.

 Left: Messeturm, Frankfurt, by Helmut Jahn, 1990.

Right: NationsBank, Atlanta, by Roche Dinkeloo, 1992.

Both images via Wikipedia Commons.

If the comparison should have always been more Mainneapolis than Mainhattan, then at least, in those years, American economic might was still the pinnacle of achievement, worthy of imitation and adoption. Architecturally, this is particularly manifest of that lengthy golden age of post-unification, pre-Euro Germany, when an optimistic Frankfurt embraced corporate American postmodernism as the face of its increasingly intra- and intercontinental financial district.

What had begun as a few German-designed glass boxes pre-1989 was joined by colorful, whimsical bank buildings rising up around the Bahnhofvertiel, of the same generation as the neoclassical office towers that became the tallest buildings in many American cities from Cleveland to Charlotte in the 1990s, as both continents reached the apex of transatlantic corporatism.

 

Left: Westend Tower, by Kohn Penderson Fox, 1993. Photo ©2003 Bauzeitgeist.

Right: US Bancorp, Minneapolis, by Pei Cobb 1992. Image via Wikipedia.

This resulted in such towers as the pyramid-capped Messeturm, which would not look out of place in Atlanta's midtown; KPF's Westend Tower, whose curving-white brise-soliel was, its hard to comprehend now, seen as daring when it was completed, spawned identical hundreds across the North America from Miami to Vancouver, later spreading to other continents. Yet Westend Tower completed a year after Pei Cobb's US Bancorp in Minneapolis opened in 1992, crowned with a similar fan.

Lastly, and while not copying so closely an particular tropes of American post-modernism, the strangely-crowned Trianon Tower has no closer kin than the Centerpoint Energy Plaza in Houston.

Top: Centerpoint Energy Plaza, Houston, with its 1996 crown. ©2003 Bauzeitgeist

 Bottom: Trianon, Frankfurt, built 1999. ©2003-2012 Bauzeitgeist

At least a few in Frankfurt seemed to take the city's gothamist nickname somewhat seriously. In looking at the architectural record, this is best supported by the extremely curious Main Plaza, on the south bank of the Main, a hotel tower which seems to directly copy Raymond Hood's 1924 Art Deco American Radiator Building in midtown Manhattan (and Chicago's Tribune Tower), which itself was inspired by gothic architecture: a transatlantic style boomerang; post-modern irony at its pinnacle.

Top: Main Plaza, Frankfurt, 2001. Photo @2012 Bauzeitgeist.

Bottom: American Radiator Building, 33rd Street, New York, by Raymond Hood, 1924.

Image via Wikipedia Commons.

On a recent visit to Frankfurt, specifically to view the exhibit at the DAM, two prominent additions to Frankfurt skyline show that Frankfurt's skyscraping continues on, but perhaps with new influences and inspirations. In the center of the city, just off the Zeil, the city's wide fußgangerzone, rises the stylish Jumeirah Hotel, the newest outpost of the Dubai-based luxury hotel chain.

Its highly-contemporary exterior, characterized by jagging and wiggling elevations and punched by stochastic slits of windows, employs two popular devices from the contemporary architecture kit of the last few years, which can be found in the United States as much as anywhere (such as the "curving" and "sexy" Roosevelt University Tower which has invaded Chicago's historic Michigan Avenue district. The Jumeriah takes the same jagged shape, while also being reminiscent of the Hilton Hotel in Houston.

 Jumeirah Frankfurt and the Zeil Hochhaus.  ©2012 Bauzeitgeist.

This new developed is adjacent to the historic Thurn und Taxis Palais, but the hotel does not utilize the older building for a substantial street presence or spacious lobby. Instead, a narrow corridor with lectern-sized front desks opens directly onto the ground floor of one the bustling, glittery, mid-market malls which dominate the pedestrian shopping precinct. While linking luxury towers to malls is a standard real estate cocktail around the world, its a formula which is waning in North America at the same time it is worshipped in Arabia, and it seems telling that luxury was conveyed in this particularly non-European fashion.

Hilton Hotel Houston ©2003 Bauzeitgeist.

The Jumeirah, part of the  Zeil Hochhaus I & II phase of the Palais Quartiel development, might therefore be best described as a Gulf hotel in a German city, programmatically, stylistically, and architecturally following the bland luxury development formula that is applied in cities everywhere nowadays.

What is therefore more remarkable both in scale and its peripheral location is the substantial European Center Bank Headquarters at the southeastern limit of the city center, at the Großmarkthalle, a vegetable market which also played an ignominious role in assembling deportees from the city during the Holocaust.

This huge complex rises outside the normally skyscraper-belt, and it is interesting to speculate on the meaning and impact of the ECB's new location, whether this move from the Bahnhofverteil to the Großmarkt marks Frankfurt's shift from its City to its Canary Wharf, especially when viewing central Frankfurt's distant cluster of skyscrapers from the riverfront, docklands-like construction site around the Großmarkthalle. German cities never shielded their centers from development like Paris, but its most skyscraper-strewn city may yet get its La Defense.

Frankfurt's Docklands: The Großmarkthalle site at a bend in the river, 

southeast of the city's center, with the existing financial district several miles distant. 

The Main Plaza is at mid-center left, behind the bridge. 

See Google Earth image at top of post to note how the oxbow bend of the Main echoes the Thames at the Docklands.

Above Image via Wikipedia.

The huge ECB premises, with twin towers pivoting toward each other at an angle connected by multiple, cantilevering sky-bridges between, is dashingly contemporary in its styling. This is the latest iteration of an emerging kinship of such twin-towers, most especially such supersleek developments as the World Trade Centre in Bahrain, which has been mentioned in this blog a few times before.

Bahrain's World Trade Center, c.2008. Image via Inhabitat.

A fable for our times, the ECB has been working on a substantial new building throughout a crisis which now impugns the very concept of a centralized Europe, which has lead no less than George Soros that Germany should either save or leave the Euro. 

While last week's announcement that the ECB development would be overbudget by 41% was met with exasperated derision and humor, that the ECB seems to be emulating new financial capitals much farther to the southeast from its old offices, the sovereign-wealth-fund federation between Doha and Abu Dhabi, with a glittering, Gulf-like financial center. Rather than recall a more rational and socially beneficial heritage of finance, the ECB's architecture reflects out to the flashy new centers of money.

Frankfurt has never been a large city, or at least, never larger by area or population than other German or European cities. Its markets and banks, the vast convention halls of the Messe, and its busy, centrally-positioned airport have made Frankfurt a global city. However, this isn't the same as being cosmopolitan, in the same way that its important book fair is not make Frankfurt a center for literature. As stated in the Guardian earlier this month, even as it has continued to persevere as a global banking center, Frankfurt has never grown into a metropolis.

Despite its under-rated museums and its pleasant quality of life, Frankfurt is only a cross-roads of trade and transport, without the overlay of romance and art that defines London or New York. Its central district holds the late-evening routes of lonely foreign businessmen, not the storied streets of a world capital. Frankfurt may so badly wish to be compared to these sophisticated cities, but it continues to grow by building upward with skyscrapers evoke those duller, more commonplace business districts that are its true peers.

Austellung: Das Architekturmodell: Werkzeug, Fetisch, Kleine Utopie

FRANKFURT.

There are less than two weeks left to see what I think might be the most marvelous and wonderful exhibit that I've seen in several years: The Architectural Model: Tool, Fetish, Small Utopia at the Deutsches Architekturmuseum in Frankfurt. This fantastic show closes on 16 September.

Visually describing a building evinces the possibility of another building

One measure of how outstanding this show is would be to report that I left a Mediterranean beach a day early in mid-August, flew to Germany and spent the night, and the show was worth missing out on another day in the ocean and the substantial extra expense of making a dedicated trip to Frankfurt.

A mid-century German children's toy of a bank block.

A delightful series of peep-holes offered views into built and unbuilt worlds

Another demonstration of the show's merits is to show here three-dozen or so images from the exhibit, which takes up three floors of the German Architectural Museum with a plethora of astonishing, inspiring, and simply gorgeous architectural models, from children's toys to presentation models, iterative study models to vast recreations of ancient monuments, rare proposals of never-built masterpieces, peep-hole views into far-off rooms and staggeringly detailed, person-sized skyscrapers.

Conrad Roland's drawing for an exhibition hall with floating levels, 1964

Conrad Roland's Spiralhochhaus, which incredibly was conceived in 1963.

Still mesmerizing: the original model for 

Frei Otto's Medizinsche Fakultät Ulm, 1965.

Wolfgang Rathke's German Pavilion for the 

Worlds Fair in Montreal, 1964-65, mode of pink straws.

The ground floor snaps entering visitors to attention with a room-full of rare masterpieces, many of them brilliant visions which never were, interspersed with tabletops stuffed with mass and volume studies of foam and wood and preliminary designs whose forms are as adventurous and ingenious as their choice of materials such as the drinking-straw dome of the Montreal Pavilion proposal. These early-stage demonstrations continue of the top floor, such as the number of studies for Christian Kerez's unbuilt Swiss Re: Headquarters in Zürich, which reached its climax in a refrigerator-sized wooden assemblage of floors, beams, ramps, and stairs.

Christian Kerez's unbuilt Swiss Re Headquarters in Zürich.

These are just some of the hundreds of items that the exhibit has collected together, some from its own vaults, some rare gems borrowed from the archives of old masters. Together, these might roughly fall into three categories: those places which exist in the world (models of real buildings, but which give license to show an alternate reality both in terms of scale with view but also material and transparency); ancient places which exist no more, and so those models which are the best representation of what was once real; and those places which have never existed: whose closest realities are the models themselves. Highlights include the tabletop hypermetabolist landscape of Arata Isozaki's Cluster in the Air to the smaller but equally wondrous proposal by Emilio Ambasz for the Center for Applied Computer Research, an unrealized Digital-Aztec precinct on the outskirts of Mexico City.

Detail of the table-size model of Arata Isozaki's Cluster in the Air, 1962

One of the more striking models in the whole exhibit: 

Emilio Ambasz's design for the Center for Applied Computer Research, 

Mexico City,1974-75

James Stirling's Churchill College proposal, Apr-May 1959

While these never-to-be environments, found on both the ground floor and the top, would alone make for a noteworthy exhibit, the second floor is particularly awesome: At model-railroad scales (most 1:200), the visitor can play bird, or god, hovering over the humungous dioramas of ancient, medieval, and modern landscapes, many of which turned to dust centuries before the helicopter. The room opens with the quintessential rotorcraft view: a frenetic five-block slice of mid-town Manhattan, bustling with taxis at the foot of the Pan Am Building and bending around Grand Central Station.

This bustle contacts with the eerie serenity of the other scenes nearby. In the whole exhibit there might be nothing so incredible a visual experience as standing alone above these landscapes of the never-more. Of all these, the lone model of the Crystal Palace presented the most jaw-dropping surprise. Even at the scale of an insect, the enormity of its enclosure is arresting, its relentless frame disappearing into the scene's dark far edge, as if it emerged from the blackness of lost history for the brief instant of this installation.

The Royal Crescent at Bath next door is similarly isolated yet, given its history, less forlorn. The other dioramas of even older times, stretching back all the way to Mycenae and Rome, Egypt and Sumeria, are not at all melancholy, but delightful and breathtaking. These might be more common in history or anthropology museums, if not toy emporiums, and certainly not in galleries of architecture, which is precisely one of the main reasons which its so refreshing to have the heart of the exhibit given over to such "popular" and non-academic displays.

The Royal Crescent, Bath.

A busy day in central Pompeii

The acropolis at Mycenae

Temple of the Pharaohs, Dêr El Bahari, Egypt.

Bruchfeldstraße Housing Development, Frankfurt-Niederrad, 1926-27

The Baroque town of Arolsen, North Hesse as it appeared in 1719

An unfortunate moment of sorts occurs as the visitor returns to the stairwell: the last diorama shows an Orinocoan settlement, a ring-clearing in the forest constructed by the indigenous Yanoama culture, one of the few moments of non-Indo-European architecture in the whole exhibit. Having seen these mono-structural villages in anthropological texts, I can attest to their impressive monumentality imbued with spiritual reasoning, which juxtaposes quite well with the square of Pompeii nearby and the Valley of Egypt across the room.

Yet the accompanying wall panel merely assigns the Yanoama the word, "primitive" which is at best a thoughtless translation, and at worst a very unenlightened classification system for a German institution to be using to categorize various peoples of the world. The more ignominious connotations of this moment are ameliorated by the floor above, which give over ample space to the importance of models in Hitler's Reich, with photos, texts, and objects from the office of Albert Speer, and the like.

The village center, a clearing the rainforest, ringed by dwellings, 

signature construction of the Yanoama, 

and how these "Indians" are described on the wall label.

A placard explaining the fascist plan for Munich, 1939.

While there is plenty of text for student or professional visitors, cueing into process, explanations of formal evolution, struggling with formal idea to execution, the constraints of construction, material, and reality, these aspects can become a bit heavy and technical, especially for those viewers who associate foam and plywood with late nights in the studio. With such a large exhibit, the great number of items to view is itself overwhelming. The exhibit might be most enjoyable in the unfamiliar moments of a micro-vista or a lilliputian skyline, understanding its translation to scale and contemplating the possibilities it suggests. These are sensations of another world.

A stunning series of small foam creations.

One particularly large display on the second floor is Foster and Partners' presentation model of the Commerzbank, one of hometown Frankfurt's most well-known skyscrapers. From this Vogelperspective, the tower still soars above the tops of heads, but the vantage point allows a view into the diminutive courtyard created by the successive arrangement of buildings of various heights and vintages, all dwarfed by the massive bank, which seems to have carved out a space in the air.

It is a simple matter of a 15-minute walk from the museum, crossing the Main on foot to see this architectural moment in person. While the model's white foam pieces come alive in brick, stone and glass in the sunlight, the dynamic might of the tower's mass against the block and older offices is somehow lessened from the street. Yet this arrangement of masses is more familiar now. Having looked down, it is better understood. For a moment, you flew above it, and could hold a tower in your hand. But you are no longer flying. The imaginary helicopter has landed back on earth, in reality.