Architecture Here and There

Illustrations: Above, Scene from a 1956 version of the novel 1984 (1949); below, Cole Porter; George Orwell; an example of Bausünden in Germany

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The world has gone mad today
And good's bad today,
And black's white today,
And day's night today,

From "Anything Goes" (1934), by Cole Porter

Anything still goes, and not least in the world of architecture today -- unless, of course, an architect proposes building something people might love, or even understand. That does not go.

A lengthy Der Spiegel article recently described Germans as liking their beautiful old buildings from before World War II but not the ugly modern ones built since. Not a week went by before another article in Der Spiegel disagreed: "Living with Sin: Germany Comes to Terms With its Ugliest Buildings."

In fact, it's all about how Germans have not come to terms with their ugliest buildings, and what German modernists plan to do about it.

Cole Porter, meet George Orwell.

In 1984, when protagonist Winston Smith buys a glass paperweight at an antiques shop, Orwell writes: "It was a queer thing, even a compromising thing, for a Party member to have in his possession. Anything old, and for that matter anything beautiful, was always vaguely suspect." Smith has a job at the Ministry of Truth, whose fortress-like façades are emblazoned with the Party's slogans: "War is Peace. Freedom is Slavery. Ignorance is Strength."

Today they'd have to add "Ugly is Beautiful." That's the "truth" that German modernists have in store for the German public. Some proposals being entertained to deal with Germans' unsophisticated preference for beauty over ugliness sound quite Orwellian.

Der Spiegel's Charles Hawley quotes Turit Fröbe, a Berlin architect: "I think it is very important, when it comes to buildings that everyone agrees are ugly, that we find methods that encourage people to see them in a different, more appreciative light."

"Instead of resigning [themselves] to living with a hated scar running the length of town," writes Hawley of a set of heating pipes running above ground through central Jena, civic leaders "leapt at a 2004 idea proposed by master's student in architecture at the Bauhaus University in nearby Weimar. Dana Kurz suggested that, instead of getting rid of the hated pipes, why not teach people to love them?"

Channeling Orwell even more directly, architect Merlin Bauer wants to erect signs atop the ugliest buildings of his city, Cologne, that plead "Liebe deine Stadt!" (Love your city!). He hopes, Hawley writes, "to draw people's attention to what he thinks is the unique beauty of the kind of modernist architecture that makes wide swaths of Cologne painful to look at."

German modernists are salivating at the experience of Fröbe, quoted above, who took photos of buildings she disliked for a calendar of Bausünden, or "architectural sins" -- one for each day of the year, stamped "Demolish!"

"After starting in Bielefeld, I went to Hanover," she told Hawley. "But I found the same crap as in Bielefeld. I soon realized it is difficult to find good, original and photogenic Bausünden. It is the good ones you can build a relationship with. Over time, I began to develop an appreciation for them and I became a fan."

That is, Fröbe experienced a sort of architectural Stockholm Syndrome -- when hostages come to identify with their captors and their ideology. After half a century of imprisonment in purposely uglified cities, most Germans are still trying to resist. But Germany's modernists hope to teach their fellow Germans how to love what they've spent decades hating.

This is not just a matter of aesthetics -- not that the appearance of one's environment is a small thing -- or of interest only to Germans. Such intellectual pretzeling has characterized the defense of modernism in America, Britain and elsewhere for decades. But "Ugly is Beautiful" can lead to other slogans that teach us to love ideas or policies that help us to resign ourselves to what we might prefer to change.

Think "Poverty is Wealth," for example, or perhaps "Taxation is Investment" or, as Cole Porter might sing, "Bad's Good Today."

Corrections

It was the Neue Nationalgalerie that was pictured with my Aug. 19 column "Hope and change, perhaps, in Germany," not the Bauhausarchiv Museum. In last week's column, "Beauty and the Bulfinch Awards," I noted that Charles Bulfinch died in 1844, a century before skyscrapers existed, but also that the Flatiron Building (1902) is an early skyscraper. I regret the vertigo caused by my mental typo.

David Brussat is a member of The Journal's editorial board (dbrussat@projo.com). His blog at projo.com is called Architecture Here and There.

 Tags  1984 Architecture Charles Hawley Cole Porter Der Spiegel George Orwell Germany Modernism

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