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Designed by Peter Behrens and Karl Bernhard; completed 1910

Berlin, Germany

Largely misunderstood by the historians of the Modern movement who celebrated it as the first major work of frank industrial architecture endowed with exceptional “functional directness,” the AEG Turbine Factory—designed by Peter Behrens and Karl Bernhard and completed 1910—remains the most admired and most influential of Behrens’s works.

 

Designed between 1908 and 1909 for the Allgemeine Elektricitäts Gesesells (AEG)—a German electrical concern founded by Emil Rathenau in 1883—the factory was placed strategically at the southern edge of the factory complex along Huttenstrasse and Berlichingenstrasse, facing Berlin and the world as a show front of the prosperous industrial magnate. Complying with such expectations and following his own ideological stance, Behrens built a magnificent iron and glass hybrid of two eminently classical temple traditions—the Greek and the Egyptian—meant to glorify industrial might.

 

In accepting the challenge of designing his first industrial building, Behrens’s concern was not to recast all of architecture in terms of industry and the machine, as was most often the case with the next generation of modern architects. Rather, “his concern was…levating so dominant a societal force as the factory to the level of established cultural standard” (see Anderson, 1977).

 

As an adept of the Austrian art historian and critic Alois Riegel’s theory of Kunstwollen (literally, “artistic will” or the evolutionary force of style) and of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel’s aesthetic historicism, exemplified in the concept of the Zeitgeist, Behrens applied in the design of the Turbine Factory the principles that he had evolved as the leader of the Darmstadt artists’ colony after 1901. In direct opposition to Gottfried Semper’s “materialism,” central to Behrens’s approach was belief in the force of the artist, and art, to transform brute everyday life into a dignified existence. Akin to the carbon transformed under extreme conditions into a praised diamond, everyday life—and in this case raw industry, the factory, and the machine—could be transformed under the artist’s  into an entity of high culture. Such an ideological position, applied to industry, spread into a number of aesthetic and symbolic themes clearly reflected in the Turbine Factory. Far from depending on primary concerns for material, technical, and functional purposes, the factory was, in Behrens’s mind, the result of a specific concretization of selected industrial features, filtered through the artist’s transcendental will to form. The result was a vast crystal symbolizing the victory of art over the banality of life in an emerging machine society. If the industrial fact at hand could not be ignored, it was not the role of the artist to succumb to it helplessly, either. It is largely because of this position that Behrens’s first industrial building was unprecedented in industrial architecture and design.

 

In aesthetic terms, the central conflict that Behrens faced in the design of the Turbine Factory was the tectonic character of the ferro-vitreous wide span offered by his engineer, Karl Bernhard, as the necessary solution for mastering the vastness of the structure and Behrens’s adherence to the concept of Stereotomie since his 1905 pavilions at the Oldenburg Northwest German Art Exhibition. The challenge was, therefore, to find a solution that would be flexible enough to accommodate the dictates of a particular technology—including the use of given industrial materials—while preserving architecture as the eminent symbol of established cultural values of a modern capitalist state. The culmination of this synthetic process was expressed in the factory’s triumphal templelike facade with its crystalline central window of staggering dimensions that only advanced technology could have brought about.

 

With his limited knowledge of any kind of building technology, Behrens had to rely on the support of an engineer for such a vast and technically complex building. The shifting priorities between ideology and technology in the conception of the building necessarily resulted in a series of ambiguities and concealments that Behrens provoked rather than avoided in a strained collaboration with Bernhard.

 

The structural makeup of the factory consists of an asymmetrical three-hinged arch reinforced by a transversal tie-rod. The longer half of the arch springs vertically up to the second hinge and then breaks in three facets before reaching the third hinge at the apex of the arch. In properly structural terms, there was no reason for breaking the second arm into segments. The decision was a willful intervention in the engineer’s work by Behrens the artist. Historically, a variety of reasons have been advanced as an explanation for such a move. Whereas Kenneth Frampton, for example, refers to a rather improbable desire to create the shape of a farmer’s barn with its typical polygonal gable, Reyner Banham offers a technological explanation: the need for clearance for the huge internal traveling crane—even though the section shows that the tying rods forced the crane to run much lower.

 

The chiseled gable was, in fact, the result of two specific exigencies of Behrens’s Kunstwollen: the urge for enforced Stereotomie and the evocation of Zeichen (sign), the crystalline symbol of life as art. Indeed, the comparison between Behrens’s earlier representation of the priestess of Darmstadt carrying the redemptive crystal high above her head, as well as the majestic front of the temple-factory, reinforces the idea of a crystalshaped gable springing high above the ground in delicate balance over the equally crystalline abstracted robe of a priestess.

 

Furthermore, using the given technology for more ambitious aims, Behrens concealed the fact that the actual structural system of the factory was made up of a series of hinged arches by capping the building with a voluminous cornice cutting the arch at the top of its vertical member. In so doing, Behrens created the visual impression of a trabeated system in which the vertical members of the arches represented so many columns of a classical temple. By the same token, the somewhat inwardly inclined glazed surfaces between the structural members of the side elevation, along with the blown-up roofline and the massive concrete nonbearing “corner stones” wrapping around a streamlined trapezoidal silhouette, created a convincing case of a perfectly “stereotomic” volume inflated with space. Thus undermining the iron framing, Behrens prevented the construction from dematerializing into a dispersed tectonic grid—as would have been the case with the Dutert-Contamin Gallerie des Machines—and clearly subverted any engineering directness. The formulation of a symbolic structure, however, did not preclude Behrens from addressing forcefully the nature and purpose of the building.

 

Still remaining in the realm of powerful symbolism, Behrens allowed the function of the building to express itself allegorically not only through the exclusive use of industrial materials on a large scale but also by evoking forcefully the dominant societal role of the machine in the most memorable details of the building, such as the giant base hinges of the arches set on high concrete pedestals. As has been noted, what makes the significance and the importance of the AEG Turbine Factory, aside from actual achievement, “is that Behrens understood that the established cultural standards must be transformed in the process of assimilating modern industry.”

 

 

Compared with the rest of the continent, the countries of North Africa form an immediately recognizable region and appear as a more cohesive bloc than do their neighbors south of the Sahara Desert. They derive their apparent cohesion from a common language (Arabic), a common religion (Islam), and a shared cultural identity as heirs of the Ottoman Empire. Like their sub-Saharan neighbors, all shared the historical experience of European colonialism and of the struggle for independence. Unlike their sub-Saharan neighbors, however, pan-Arabism has been a more powerful force than African unity.

 

On closer examination, all the countries of North Africa have developed their own distinctive cultural identity and historic perception of themselves and their role in the world. Egypt, with its overpowering legacy of its Pharaonic past and its small but influential Coptic Christian minority, has always perceived itself as distinctively different from the Maghreb (the countries to the west) and more naturally internationalist in outlook. Morocco, which was the only country in North Africa that did not suffer the experience of Ottoman rule, prided itself on the purity of its national culture and the dignity of its sultanate.

 

At the beginning of the 20th century, the Ottoman Empire was collapsing all around the Mediterranean: Its final death throes came after it allied itself with the German and AustroHungarian Empires at the beginning of World War I. Egypt had effectively become a protectorate of Britain in 1882, to the intense annoyance of France, which had enjoyed most-favorednation status in Egypt since Napoleon’s short-lived expedition to Egypt in 1799–1801. Algeria (or at least the coastal strip) became a French colony in 1830, to which the mountainous hinterland and the desert interior were added in 1848, and by 1900 it was effectively part of metropolitan France. Tunisia, as a consequence of the dey of Tunis’s indebtedness to French bankers, was annexed by France in 1881. The Sudan, over which vast territory British troops had campaigned sporadically for 20 years, was absorbed into the British Empire in 1899 as an Anglo-Egyptian condominium. Libya was invaded by Italy and incorporated into the infant Italian Empire in 1912; in the same year, Morocco became a protectorate of France by treaty, proudly safeguarding its cultural independence as the brightest jewel in the French imperial crown.

 

The European colonial experience was, with the exception of Algeria, short-lived and, again with the exception of Algeria, relatively bloodless. Egypt gained its independence in 1922 under the Albanian dynasty, whose founder, Mohammed Ali, had seized power from the Ottomans and imposed himself as khedive on the long-suffering Egyptian people in 1805, shortly after Napoleon’s expedition to Egypt. Effective independence was not really secured until the revolution under General Neguib and until Colonel Nasser overthrew King Farouk and seized power in 1952. With the exception of Algeria, all other North African states gained their independence in the 1950s: Algeria, after a long, bloody civil war between the European settlers (10 percent of the population) and the indigenous Africans, finally followed suit in 1962. (A couple of insignificant Spanish enclaves on the Mediterranean coast of Morocco still owe allegiance to Europe.)

 

For the first half of the 20th century, the architectural and urban development of North Africa was European directed and European driven. At the beginning of the century, European imperialism was at its apogee, and between 1900 and the outbreak of World War I in 1914, with a few significant exceptions, colonial governments, architects, and developers aimed to recreate Europe in Africa. By 1900 regionalism and vernacular revivalism had become respectable, even fashionable, architectural styles in Europe in a period when eclecticism reigned.

 

Physical manifestations of imperialistic rule, such as the Union Jack-inspired town plan of the new capital of the Sudan (Khartoum) and the Hausmannesque boulevards imposed on the organic city plan of Algiers were characteristic of this period but by no means were universal. Equally popular were the garden suburb, garden city developments that were fashionable in Europe: the Garden Suburb along the Nile in Cairo, the more ambitious New Town of Heliopolis on the desert fringe of the same city, and the Parc d’Hydra and the hilly suburbs of El Biar in Algiers were laid out in European lines for a mainly European settler population.

 

(Arabism) and the Hispano-Mauresque Revival were eagerly adopted by French architects in Algeria, as the Saracenic, Coptic, and even Pharaonic styles were adopted by the polyglot architects practicing in Egypt.

 

Representative buildings of the pre-World War I period, when European imperialism reigned supreme, were the Post Office (1890–1900, Algiers) by Tondoir and Voinot, the Galerie Algerienne (1902, Algiers) by Voinot, and the Prefecture (1904, Algiers) and the Hotel St. Georges (1910; now the Hotel El Djezair, Algiers), all in a highly decorative and stylized part Ottoman, part Hispano-Mauresque style inspired by the wealth of handsome 18th-century Ottoman buildings in the city. Also representative, in Cairo, are the eclectically classicist Egyptian Museum (1900), the vernacular revivalist Coptic Museum (1910), and the Beaux-Artian, symmetrically planned buildings of the Cairo University (founded as Fuad University in 1908); in Khartoum, the neo-Byzantine Anglican All Saints’ Cathedral (1909–12) by Robert Weir Schulz and the late Ottoman-style Gordon Memorial College (c. 1905; now the University of Khartoum) by Fabricius Bey and Gorringe are representative.

 

Lieutenant Gorringe was a British army officer serving with the Royal Engineers; Fabricius Bey was architect to the khedive in Cairo and of southern European (probably Maltese) origin. Under the autocratic rule of Lord Cromer, British consul-general in Egypt from 1883 to 1907, whose job title concealed the virtually absolute power he wielded, Cairo and Alexandria were boom cities, and architects and engineers flocked to Egypt from all over Europe. The indigenous Egyptian elite—the educated middle classes who had enjoyed a privileged position in society under the Francophile rule of Khedive Ismail before the British invasion of Egypt in 1882—were increasingly sidelined under Cromer’s administration and agitated for a national university and for a school of fine arts under Egyptian control. The foundation of the École des Beaux-Arts in 1906 and of Fuad University in 1908 were the results of their efforts. By 1920 both institutions (now the University of Helwan at Zamalek and Cairo University, respectively) had schools of architecture. Not until the 1920s, therefore, were indigenous Egyptians able to study architecture in their own country. The few Egyptian architects who were in practice in the early decades of the century had studied abroad at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris or at Constantinople. A similar situation prevailed throughout North Africa: not until the École Polytechnique d’Architecture et Urbanisme (EPAU) was founded in Algiers after World War II were there any schools of architecture in North Africa outside Egypt. Inevitably, it was well into the second half of the century before indigenous African architects were able to make a major contribution to the physical development of their homelands.

 

If the period before World War I was the high point of European imperialism, the period between the world wars was the decline of empire; however, the architectural and urban development of North Africa was still almost entirely European driven. Morocco, under its first French resident-general, Hubert Lyautey (1912–25), pursued a clear-sighted policy of state intervention in urban development (as did Libya) after Benito Mussolini seized power in Italy in 1922 and sought to revive the splendors of Rome’s imperial past in Africa.

 

Marshal Lyautey sought conscientiously to conserve what remained of the Moroccan architectural heritage—Hispano-Mauresque, Arab, and Berber. He stated, “While in other parts of North Africa we only found social debris, here…we have found a constituted empire, and with it a beautiful and great civilization…. A remarkable Morocco can be created, that will remain Moroccan and Islamic” (quoted in Betts, 1978). However, he was not averse to contemporary architectural developments: Auguste and Gustave Perret designed and built the Dock Installations and Warehouses (1915) in Casablanca, but the cities of Casablanca and Rabat were replanned on grandiloquent lines and had public buildings that were both neoclassical and embellished with Hispano-Mauresque decoration, as in the Law Courts (1915) in Casablanca by J.Marrast and the Post Office (c.1920) in Rabat by J.Laforgue.

 

The Italian administration showed no such sensitivity in Libya, except toward the imperial Roman sites. Tripoli was replanned as the colonial capital, and the new town was created on provincial Italian lines, designed by the architects A.Novello and O.Cabiatti; in building during the 1920s and 1930s, it was a prototype of Giovanni Pellegrini’s Manifesto dell’ architettura coloniale (1936).

 

No such high-mindedness drove the architectural development of the other North African countries. Where appropriate, arabisance prevailed, as in the Waqf Ministry Building (1925) by Mahmould Fahmy Pasha and the Bank Misr (1927) by A. Laseiac in Cairo; in general, however, North Africa followed European precedents: a pared-down Neoclassicism in the 1920s with some commercial Art Deco in the downtown streets of major cities, a tentative adoption of modernism, and the International Style in the 1930s. Algeria generally set the pace: the Palais du Gouvernement General (1930; now the Palace of Government) designed by M.J.Guiauchain with A. and G.Perret, the Maison des Etudiants (1933) by C.Montaland, and the Town Hall (1935) by L.Claro, all in Algiers, are no less advanced than are their contemporaries in Europe. In addition, Algiers was the subject of Le Corbusier’s most sustained urban-planning initiatives. Between 1933 and 1942, he published no fewer than three major plans for the city; formal concepts first proposed for Algiers were eventually realized elsewhere (such as the Ministry of Education building in Rio de Janeiro and the UNESCO headquarters in Paris).

 

The struggle for independence and the consolidation of power after achieving it preoccupied the governments of all North African countries during the first decade and a half after the end of World War II (part of which was fought over North African terrain), and the series of Arab-Israeli wars, culminating in the disastrous war of 1973 and the devastation of the Suez Canal Zone, deprived the region of the economic security and political stability that is a prerequisite for sound and sustained physical development. In contrast, the final quarter of the century saw massive investment in building and a transformation of the built environment throughout the region (with the exception of Sudan, where a civil war has been waging for 20 years).

 

The provision of adequate housing for the mass of the people has been a major priority of all governments in the region since independence. The rehousing of immigrant squatters on the outskirts of all major cities, the protection of the limited areas of fertile agricultural land from population invasion, the reconstruction of the devastated Suez Canal cities, and the creation of new towns to accommodate the overflow of population from the major cities have become major areas of architectural activity. Hassan Fathy was one of the first North African architects to engage seriously with the problems of popular housing: his modest book Architecture for the Poor, which describes his attempt to create a humane environment in the resettlement village of New Gourna on the west bank of the Nile at Thebes in Upper Egypt, has been acclaimed worldwide and has transformed architects’ perceptions of their social responsibility as housing providers. Hassan Fathy was also one of the pioneers, along with his contemporary Ramses Wissa Wassef, in the revival of traditional materials, constructional systems, and craft skills. The bulk of his practice, however, was the design of individual houses and villas for private clients. Abdel Wahid El Wakil is an accomplished younger Egyptian architect designing in a similar manner.

 

Inevitably, however, given the enormous shortfall in housing provision, the emphasis in most state-funded social housing schemes has been on quantity rather than quality, and four-, five-, or six-story walk-up blocks of apartments have become the norm. Some architects have handled such assignments well (for example, Elie Azagury’s apartment blocks in Rabat and Casablanca [1960s] or Candilis, Josic, Woods and Pons’s residential estate Sidi-bel-Abbes in Oran, Algeria [1950s]), but the scale of most state housing schemes necessitates the formation of large international multidisciplinary teams of architects and engineers, as in the huge new cities in the desert hinterland of Cairo established by the Egyptian Ministry of Reconstruction, New Communities, and Land Reclamation in the 1980s: Sadat City, 10th Ramadan City, and 6th October City.

 

Also in the state sector, major building programs for education and health care have sought to remedy the neglect of these areas by the colonial authorities and to demonstrate governments’ commitment to the provision of education and health care for all. Provincial universities and regional hospitals are perceived as flagships of government policy, and architects of international reputation are commissioned for major projects (such as James Cubitt and Partners for the University of Garyounis, Benghazi, Libya; Oscar Niemeyer for the University of Constantine, Algeria; and Charles Boccara for the 1982 Regional Hospital, Marrakesh, Morocco).

 

Tourism has generated large downtown hotels and holiday resorts. Good examples of the latter include work by architects A.Faraoui and P.de Mazieres in Morocco, Fernand Pouillon in Algeria, and Serge Santelli in Tunisia. In addition, the demands of tourism undoubtedly generated several major historic and archaeological conservation projects, the most spectacular being the UNESCO-sponsored re-erection of the temple of Rameses II at Abu Simbel on an elevated site overlooking Lake Nasser in Upper Egypt.

 

A major factor that was instrumental in the evident raising of standards of architectural service and of the quality of architectural design in the last 20 years of the century was the institution of the Aga Khan Award for Architecture (AKAA). Conservation of the environment, community involvement in the design decision-making process, and the appropriateness as well as the quality of the executed design are among the criteria for selecting buildings for an award. The patronage of the Aga Khan through this award scheme has both publicized and promoted, as models for other architects to emulate, several excellent buildings and conservation schemes in North Africa, among them the Arts Center at Harrania near Giza in Egypt by Wissa Wassef, the revitalization of the Hafsia quarter of the Medina in Tunis, and the Dar Lamane Housing Community in Casablanca, Morocco.

 

Finally, two outstanding buildings that have become icons of their countries’ commitment to excellence in architecture and the arts are the new Cairo Opera House and Cultural Center (1987–92) on Gezira Island by the Japanese consortium Nikkei Sekkai Planners Architects and Engineers and the Great Mosque (1986–93) in Casablanca, commissioned by King Hassan II from the French architect Marcel Pinseau. By way of postscript, with about 20 schools of architecture in the region at the turn of the millennium, the 21st century can expect a much higher proportion of buildings in North Africa to be designed by indigenous architects than was true in the 20th century. ANTHONY D.C.HYLAND.

 

 

Designed by Kenzo Tange; completed 1981

 

In 1976 the Nigerian state authorities believed that a new federal capital city would facilitate the creation of a “federal character” and thus resolve the problem of nepotism and relieve ethnic tensions among the 250 cultural groups that constitute the Nigerian nation. Abuja and its architecture, it was believed, would also remove the colonial identity that the erstwhile capital city of Lagos was thought to bestow on the Nigerian people.

 

As a result, the role of Lagos as the federal capital of Nigeria has been in question from 1960, when Nigeria became independent, to 9 August 1975, when General Murutala Mohammed set up an eight-member Committee on the Location of the Federal Capital of Nigeria. The task of the committee was to review the multiple roles of Lagos as the federal capital of Nigeria, the capital of the state of Lagos, and the economic capital of the country.

 

The committee concluded that a new federal capital would improve Nigeria’s national security, enhance Nigerian interior development, encourage the decentralization of economic infrastructures from Lagos, and enhance the development of an indigenous Nigerian building culture and industry. Finally, the new capital would emphasize Nigeria’s emergence from the civil war of 1967–70 as a more united, stable, and confident country. Nigerian lawmakers who shared the opinions of the committee justified the idea of developing a new federal capital by suggesting that there existed a fundamental need for a place where all Nigerians could come together on an equal basis to help foster national unity. Moreover, advocates of a new federal capital city raised the problems of overcrowding and lack of land for future expansion at Lagos as well as the existence of severe social inequality in the colonial cities of Nigeria. As a result, Abuja was conceived as a place that symbolized Nigeria’s autonomy from British colonization, urban segregation, and a federal character that all Nigerians could share in regardless of ethnic heritage. According to the committee and the International Planning Association (IPA), the new capitol would provide “a balanced development focus for the nation”. They chose Japanese modernist Kenzo Tange, a protégé of Le Corbusier, as the principal architect for the city plan.

 

The federal government of Nigeria produced a schedule for implementing the committee’s recommendations on 4 February 1976. Decree No. 6 established for Nigeria a Federal Capital Territory—an African version of the District of Columbia—a neutral ground where a Nigerian federal character would be developed for the good of all Nigerians. The government took an 8,000-square-kilometer parcel (more than twice the size of the state of Lagos) out of three minority states. Abuja is located on the Gwagwa Plains in the middle of Nigeria; its high elevation and numerous hills contribute to a year-round pleasant climate, one of the major attractions that influenced the committee to select the site.

 

Abuja was conceived as a city for three million people to be developed in 20 years, and its master plan symbolized the themes of democracy and Nigerian unity. Construction began at Abuja in 1981 under the leadership of President Shehu Shagari (who was later deposed), who was anxious to move from Lagos to the new Federal Capital Territory.

 

The Nigerian authorities of state insisted that Aso Hill must be the most prominent element within the Federal Capital Territory. Aso Hill is a huge granite outcrop (1,300 feet high) that dominates the landscape of Abuja and its vicinity visually and physically, giving the city a natural east-west axis. Moreover, creating the image of a democratic landscape that emblemizes the Constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria (patterned after the United States’ checks-and-balances system of government) was also an integral part of the Abuja urban design scheme. As a result, a democratic shrine called the Three Arms Zone was created at the foot of Aso Hill, making it the focal point of the city and the locus of power of the federal government of Nigeria. Abuja’s Three Arms Zone is one kilometer in diameter, and the buildings of the National Assembly, the Presidential Palace, and the Supreme Court are located within it. From Aso Hill in the east end of the city, one moves through the ceremonial Abuja National Mall, which is also patterned after that of Washington, D.C. However, the axial view of the mall is flanked by high-rise federal office buildings on both sides, terminating first at the quintuple towers of the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation and finally at the National Stadium in the west of the city.

 

Although the Abuja master plan also aspires to position the city as a major pan-African commercial, financial, and political center, it is dominated by a rhetoric of Nigerian unity, national identity, and democracy. As a result, it is characterized by unresolved tensions between its nationalist themes, the intentions of the emergent Nigerian intelligentsia who inherited political power from Britain, and the intentions of the architect. First, Tange’s fundamental concept for Abuja’s master plan resembles the plan for Tokyo. One could argue that Tange’s plan to incorporate the Japanese modernism of Tokyo represented an attempt to meet the needs of Nigerian national identity; but concerns remained as to whether the architect’s uniform design for the monumental federal buildings reflected the interests of the emergent Nigerian elite who inherited political power from Britain, or whether the new structure contributed to the erasure of certain ethnically based social boundaries. The insistence of the federal government of Nigeria that Aso Hill be the most prominent object in the Federal Capital Territory suggests that it was adopting an ancient “pagan” ritual site (Aso Hill) as a means of reinventing a Nigerian “federal character,” something quite different from the version of modernity that Tange envisioned. Advocates of the Aso Hill complex envisioned it as a sign of stability, nationality, and cultural myth making in the vibrant, new capital city.

 

Military dictators interpreted Abuja’s master plan as a document that required the isolation of the Three Arms Zone (as a shrine to power) from the rest of the city to make it inaccessible for public gathering. The river that runs down the foot of Aso Hill forms a moat between the central part of the city and the Zone. This moat can be crossed only by bridge, and the bridge is designed to be easily barricaded in time of civil disturbances. Hence, marching to the shrine of power, as is the case in most democratic societies, has been neutralized by the manner in which the master plan was interpreted and implemented. Any march in the city will stop at the national mall in the central district. This outcome was not by accident but by the careful intentions of the military dictators who built Abuja and who deliberately chose to ignore existing traditional urban examples in Nigeria. The ideology that privileges a landscape that can forge national unity in Nigeria will face several practical challenges with the national assembly and the civilian president, who took over power on 29 May 1999 after 15 years of continuous military dictatorship.

 

 

 

Designed by Hans Hollein; completed 1982

Since the 1990s, it has not been uncommon for architects and their clients to break with the two previously prevailing alternatives—temple or warehouse—for art museums, but such a typological rupture had been dramatically anticipated two decades earlier, by Hans Hollein in the Museum Abteiberg, a unique building tailored to an unusual site and a distinctive collection. The Pritzker Prize laureate of 1985, who was born in Vienna in 1934 and is an artist, teacher, and creator of furniture, interiors, and exhibitions, has at Mönchengladbach assembled a virtual primer of museum design, one that has brought a heretofore unknown visceral excitement to the vocation of museum going. In contrast to later attempts in this genre, however, Hollein’s achievement has contributed to an intensified appreciation of the museum’s contents rather than making a personal statement at their expense.

 

Although Hollein has learned from the institutional buildings of Louis I.Kahn and Alvar Aalto, he listens to his own music, which—to pursue the metaphor—includes concerti from the 18th, symphonies from the 19th, and popular songs from the 20th centuries. His eclecticism served him well in this complex commission, made more difficult by the need for the museum to serve urban as well as aesthetic ends. Hollein has linked Mönchengladbach’s town center on the heights with the medieval Ettal Abbey (today the city hall) on the slopes below, assembling a multi-tiered museum from a series of discrete elements of different sizes and shapes that provide a series of delightfully varied indoor and outdoor rooms. Distributing the individual volumes in space rather than containing them within a monolithic whole allowed him to maintain the picturesque scale of the town; at the subterranean level, the disparate sections are united.

 

Although designing a museum is always challenging, it is perhaps less onerous when, in contrast to those encyclopedic institutions that are in continual flux, its holdings consist of a focused group of works. Kahn found such a golden opportunity in the Kimbell Museum, and Hollein has exploited the similar possibilities here, where he worked closely with the director, Jonathan Cladders, in formulating the program. They believe that today the museum itself represents a Gesamtkunstwerk (total work of art), “a huge scenario into which the individual work is fitted…not the autonomy of the work at any price but the deliberately staged correspondence between space and work of  art” (Klotz, 1985, p. 19). This especially applies to contemporary art, which frequently is deliberately produced for a museum setting. The plan that Hollein and Cladders evolved is without precedent for this building type. None of the customary tropes, whether conventional or modern—vaulted galleries arranged symmetrically, the universal space, the proverbial white cube—are present. Instead, the combination of small, contained cabinets and larger rooms perfectly accommodates a collection that, although including some historical pieces, is mainly focused on the post-World War II period and, although international, is richly endowed with work by American artists of such competing movements as Minimalism, Post-Painterly Abstraction, and Pop. Many works are in the form of installations without customary boundaries or frames and do not necessarily require natural light.

 

From the town, one enters the museum precinct via an elevated walkway that leads to a stone-faced platform whereon is set a tower containing administrative offices; a library; workshops and storage; a cubic, top-lighted undivided volume for temporary displays; the shedroofed, zinc-clad “clover-leaf” pavilion for the permanent collection; and the entrance temple. The platform also covers museum spaces excavated into the hill, and from it, one can descend gradually to curving terraces, furnished with sculpture, that border the gardens of the former abbey; beneath a portion of the terraces are additional exhibition areas.

 

Hollein has rejected the prescribed routes encountered in traditional museums for mysterious, polymorphous paths that compel the viewer to wander on her own and discover unexpected places, then to turn back on them or chance on new chambers. Because chronology is not the issue it would be for a historically based collection, the ad hoc character is stimulating rather than frustrating. Upstairs and downstairs, under- and above-ground, the variously configured galleries illuminated by diverse means—daylight through windows and skylights and artificial light via incandescent, neon, and fluorescent fixtures—permit individual works to be perceived in the setting most sympathetic to their makers’ intentions. The most organized part of the display areas comprises what Hollein calls the “cloverleaf”—a group of seven “kissing squares,” to use Kahn’s formulation, that are traversed at the corners. Set under saw-toothed skylights, these rooms are ideal for big pieces by such artists as Andy Warhol, Frank Stella, Carl Andre, and Roy Lichtenstein. There are also curved rooms, some with undulating walls that are positively Baroque in character; double-height spaces and circular steps add further drama. Hollein’s rejection of the convention of amorphous flexible areas, dominant since the 1940s, in favor of a rich variety of specific and distinctive spaces, would in the 1990s become a popular solution for art museums—yet another example of the way the Museum Abteiberg adumbrates many later schemes for this type of institution.

 

Also prescient is Hollein’s interjection of playfulness and irony into the reverence that typically pervades museum design. Although marble clads some of the surfaces, it is combined with less elevated masonry materials like brick and sandstone. Reflective as well as transparent glass appears; zinc is placed beside chromium and steel. One side of the temple-like pavilion that forms the main entrance sports graffiti in red paint, matching the color of some of the railings. Exterior light fixtures have an industrial character in contrast to the lush surrounding landscape and the textured brick walls and paths. The visitor, constantly encountering the unpredictable, is sensitized to the daring originality of the art displayed.

 

It is instructive to compare Museum Abteiberg with another German museum from the same period that similarly had a profound effect on subsequent museum design—James Stirling’s Neue Staatsgalerie (1977–84) at Stuttgart. Both are set on irregular terrain and require urbanistic interventions, but Stirling’s solution revives and updates the 19th-century museum paradigm, whereas Hollein has jettisoned all previous solutions. Both make reference to industrial as well as classical buildings and use the technique of compositional collage, yet their differences illuminate the manifold possibilities inherent in the museum program.

 

 

 

 

Nestled in the Bavarian Alps of Germany, Neuschwanstein was built as the private retreat of King Ludwig II. When work commenced in 1869, the royal ruler requested that the architect Eduard Riedel base his design upon the stage sets of German scenery painter Christian Jank. Outside, the towers and spires were a romantic reinterpretation of a classic medievel castle, yet the interior was equipped with every modern convenience available. In 1886, Ludwig II died with his castle unfinished and cloaked in scaffolding.

 

 

 

 

Tourist Hit

Each year, 1.3 million tourists visit this scenic part of Germany and pass through Neuschwanstein.

 

 

On Tap

Mineral-rich drinking water was piped to the castle from a natural spring 650 ft (200 m) away.

 

 

Modern Conveniences

Features of the castle included elevators, automatic flushing toilets, and a telephone system.

 

 

Stage of Opera

Ludwig II admired the composer Richard Wagner, basing the castle’s interior painting on his operas.

 

 

Dinner For One

 

As Ludwig II dined alone, the dining room was small compared to the rest of the castle.

 

 

Imitation Luxury

 

Much of the room’s grandeur was an illusion – the pillars and mosaics were plaster and paint.

 

 

Combined Influences

 

From Romanesque to Gothic and Byzantium, the interior was a mixture of architectural styles.

Wagner Performance

The castle’s first Wagner concert was performed in the Singer’s Hall more than 60 years after Ludwig’s death.

 

 

Eroding Surface

The Alp’s harsh wintry climate erodes the soft limestone surface, requiring regular maintenance.

 

 

Limestone Exterior

The limestone used to clad the brick exterior was quarried from the nearby town of Alterschrofen.

 

 

Gothic Grandeur

Over four years, 14 artisans carved the oak that made up the king’s Gothic-inspired bedroom.

 

 

King’s Hideaway

With colored lighting and small waterfall, “The Grotto” was built to resemble a dripstone cave.

 

 

Wide Windows

 

When Neuschwanstein was built, the windowpanes were considered very large and extravagant.

 

 

Central Heating

In freezing winters, the castle was kept warm by a sophisticated central heating system.

 

 

Hired Help

The reclusive king refused visitors, and had more than 30 servants while he lived in the castle.

 

 

Unstable Soils

Set on shitting rock, the castle’s foundations need constant maintenance to ensure safety.

 

 

Laying Foundations

The foundation stone was laid in 1869, but king did not live in the castle until 1884.

 

 

Opera Enthusiast

 

When planning Neuschwanstein’s construction, King Ludwig II asked the stage scenery designer Christian Jank to create an artwork (above) for the architects to use as their blueprint. Jank was later employed to paint murals of medieval kings, knights, and poets that composer Richard Wagner mentioned inn his operas.

 

 

WOW!

 

King Ludwig II used the latest technologies in all areas of his life. He was said to travel by night in high-powered sleighs and coaches, while dressed in historic costume.

 

   

 

Castle Grandeur

 

Featuring a crown protected by fierce animals, the king’s personal coat of arms was carved over the castle’s main entrance. This led the way into room after room of ornate columns, decorative details, and colorful paintings. A swan crest was also seen regularly throughout the castle.  Lohengrin, the hero of Wagner’s opera of the same name, was known as the “swan knight” because he sailed in a boat pulled by a swan.

 

 

 

Building blocks

 

Like the dramatic operas that King Ludwig II admired, the construction of Neuschwanstein Castle was an epic production. Building work commenced on the castle in 1869, with the foundation stone laid on September 5 of that year, and its roofs finally added in 1881. The site has an idyllic outlook over rugged mountain alps and low-lying meadows, yet the remote rocky location was a challenge for the teams of construction staff. Tons of bricks, cement, and Salzburg marble were carted to the site from Bavaria and neighboring lands, with cranes powered by steam engines lifting the materials into place.

 

 

Under Construction

 

During its long construction, the castle’s architectural plans changed frequently from the original plan. The deep rock foundations beneath the castle provided a strong anchor for the towering wooden scaffolding that surrounded the structure for 15 years.

 

 

 

Fairytale Castle

 

The Sleeping Beauty Castle at Disneyland theme park in California was based on the design of Neuschwanstein. Opened by Walt Disney on July q7, 1955, the pink and blue fantasy structure includes “fortifications” imitating a traditional Germanic Castle, such as watchtower, turrets, a drawbridge, and moat.

 

The Strata Tower, a forty-story, luxury residential building designed by architects Hani Rashid and Lisa Anne of Asymptot. has broken Al Raha Beach and is now under construction. The tower is scheduled for completion in early 2011 and, at a height 0f 160 meters, will be the tallest building in the Al Dana precinct, the centerpiece of Aldar Properties PJG’s prestigious Al –Raha Beach Development. The project and development has showcased at Citycape Abu Dhabi from May 13 – 15, 2008. The Landmark Strata Tower is designed to signify a dignified and important future for Abu Dhabi and the region.

As a signature architectural statement, the Srtata Tower’s articulate, striking phyical presence seeks to encapsulate meaning through the use of abstract from drawn from both local cultural landscapes and motifs and dynamic forces of global influence. The Strata Tower’s design utilizes primarily mathematical means in its design to achieve both a poetic, as well as highliy pertinent, architecture, for the UAE, a region in flux with ambitions for continued rapid growth.

The Strata Tower’s innovative form was created using state of the art, advanced parametric modeling tools and techniques from the onset of the design process to the production phase. The building’s design emerged from various influences and factors including economies of production and fabrications with special concideration given to enviromental sustanability. Sophisticated computer modeling and tools were utilized to produced the building’s intelligent, enviromentally responsive louver system that is held in a unique, cantilevered, exoskeleton structure. The exoskeleteon veils the entire tower in a shimmering curvilinear form set against Abu Dhabi’s surrounding desert and sea, embracing and reflecting the ever changing light and atmospheres that enfold and contain it.

As architecture teh Strata Tower resists being an overt, singular gesture reliant on a set meaning or association. Rather, the mathematical properties used, not unlike those in the manifestation of the arabesque or abstract calligraphy; give the building its supreme elegance, prominence and potential for meaning and significance.

THE BANK OF AMERICA MERRILL LYNCH SECTOR VIEW ON UAE PROPERTY NOTES THAT DUBAI’S PRIME ASSET MARKET MAY HAVE REACHED A FLOOR

The BofA Merrill Lynch sector view on Dubai property sees an emerging floor for prime and retail assets despite structural hangovers and overcapacity. However, it also expects average residential prices to fall by 15 per cent this year.

“We see an emerging floor for prime assets, particularly in the retail sector, which has the smallest supply pipeline,” notes the report by Karthik Sankaran, Abdelrali El Jattari and Stephen Pettyfer, analysts of BofA Merrill Lynch. The experts state that demand is price elastic and cyclical growth in Dubai’s core retail, trade and tourism sectors are likely to resume despite quasi-sovereign debt issues.

Dubai has demonstrated a remarkable capacity to sustain premium rents and pricing power despite the perceived saturation. Nowhere is this more apparent than the fairly robust performance of retail assets. The retail will be the first real estate asset class to demonstrate medium-term growth. A modest 4 per cent decline in rental revenues is expected in 2010, but 3-4 per cent growth is also expected in 2011-12. Average mall rents, despite softening 18-25 per cent in 2009, still command US$900sqm pa. The report expects continued softening in smaller retail enclaves and older malls, due to rising competition from new-generation malls. Top destination malls still claim to have waiting lists, while recent supply has been absorbed without much strain, the view adds.

TRANSACTIONAL VOLUMES REMAIN WEAK The report notes that Dubai’s real estate market was built on ‘free-wheeling’ off-plan capital flows and needs transition towards end-user driven demand, in the medium term.There are formidable challenges also as neither regulation nor demographics are favourable for the creation of a true end-user market in the near term. The cost of ownership is simply too expensive to lure potential buyers; prices have yet to adjust to reflect excess inventory and transaction volumes remain sluggish.

NO DOUBLE DIP RECESSIONThere is little evidence of the feared ‘double dip’ recession and on the contrary there are signs of recovery.However, what is critical near term is the renewed government commitment to reduce the spectre of imminent default by rescheduling and repaying short-term debt. This, in itself, should rebuild confidence, which would aid the ongoing private sector recovery.

RESIDENTIAL PRICES TO FALLOn the residential sector, the cost of ownership is still prohibitive and regulatory environment remains unfavourable. Specifically to Dubai, which has been dependent historically on foreign capital flows, regulatory changes that would again permit property owners to gain long-term residency (withdrawn in 2008) would be a strong positive. More needs to be done to ‘triage’ and segregate viable projects from those that have little hope of completion.Further on the pricing environment the market has ‘conquered’ the first two phases of the down cycle; namely the exogenous liquidity and confidence shock in 4Q08 and the second round chain reaction in terms of employment contraction. However, a final leg-down is expected as the market has yet to fully price for excess inventory. The average residential prices will decline by 15 per cent in 2010.Residential rents have fallen almost 50 per cent from peak levels (30 per cent for prime villas and apartments) – in effect back to late 2006 levels. Rents are likely to remain more resilient than capital values and have plateaued in established neighbourhoods. Transaction volumes are still 60-70 per cent below peak levels according to brokers.

WHAT WILL SHAPE THE MEDIUM-TERM OUTLOOK?The biggest medium-term risk to the thesis of a ‘soft landing’ from this point is not merely oversupply, but the possibility of foreclosures and mass market auctions (so far non-existent) creating another round of distressed sales. Mass liquidation of unsold inventory is unlikely to be permitted.The sustainability of Dubai’s real estate market will depend on policy measures to convert transient expatriate employees into permanent residents and opening up long term capital market funding options for the real estate sector.The report visualises demand transitioning from primarily off-plan ‘bulk’ investors to end-users and buy-to-let investors who would place a greater premium on location and infrastructure factors over short-term capital gains and the ‘work in progress’ or ‘construction site’ status of several development zones, which were built speculatively.

NEAR-TERM: PRICE ADJUSTMENT INCOMPLETEThe number of residential units, four and five start hotel rooms and completed office space will go up in 2011. However, no additional mall space is expected for the next two years. The retail sector is likely to benefit from regional consumption flows.INWARD MIGRATION NOT A PANACEA The average residential prices are expected to fall by 15 per cent in 2010, following a 45 per cent decline from 3Q08 peak levels. “We see a rational unwinding and market segmentation over the medium term. We believe inward migration (from surrounding emirates) will support established residential locations, but this is not a panacea. Even if all qualifying expats from Abu Dhabi and Sharjah relocated to Dubai tomorrow, we estimate that there would still be 44,000 vacant units in 2010 rising to 73,000 by 2011. This would require a CAGR in population of 8% in 2009-11 to fill the empty space – a tall order. Clearly, inward migration should support rents in high-quality residential zones but is insufficient, on its own, to absorb surplus stock,” the report says.

HOSPITALITY PROFITABLE The report notes that tourist inflows more than doubled as well as the total four and five star room supply tripled during the period from 2000-08. Visitor arrivals in 2009 is estimated at 7-7.5m, (flat to -5% YoY), which would place Dubai in the top-10 most visited cities globally.In terms of performance, Dubai suffered the most significant decline across the region in 2009 with revenues per available room (REVPAR) down by 33 per cent to US$170 (vs 15-20 per cent across the region) and an occupancy rate of around 73.3 per cent versus 82.6 per cent in 2008. “At the trough, we believe occupancy levels hit 60-65 per cent in summer 2009,” says the report.However, REVPAR has started showing signs of stabilization in 2010, down just 2 per cent YoY in February 2010 with occupancy rising to 79 per cent YTD, concludes the report.