The Transparent State

Architecture and Politics in Postwar Germany

Deborah Ascher Barnstone

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2004
• Print ISBN: 9780415700191
• eBook ISBN: 9781135996468
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Architecture General

Examining the transformation of transparency as a metaphor in West German political thought to an analogy for democratic architecture, this bookquestions the prevailing assumption in German architectural circles that transparency in governmental buildings can be equated with openness, accessibility and greater democracy.

The Transparent State traces the development of transparency in German political and architectural culture, tying this lineage to the relationship between culture and national identity, a connection that began before unification of the German state in the eighteenth century and continues today. The Weimar Republic and Third Reich periods are examined although the focus is on the postwar period, looking at the use of transparency in the three projects for a national parliament - the 1949 Bundestag project by Hans Schwippert, the 1992 Bundestag building by Gunter Behnisch and the 1999 Reichstag renovation by Norman Foster.

Transparency is an important issue in contemporary architectural practice; this book will appeal to both the practising architect and the architectural historian.

Chapter 1 Transparency ideology

From which origins the parliamentary building should be formed is primarily a political and secondarily an architectonic question.

Adolf Arndt¹

Abstraction, transparency, simultaneity, and symbolization are means of expression which appear both at the dawn of art and today.

Sigfried Giedion²

“He who builds transparently, builds democratically,” is a truism of parliamentary architecture in the Federal Republic of Germany adopted to further several postwar myths: the occasion of a Zero Hour; the existence of a democratic architecture and its opposite, a totalitarian one; the likening of an open society with a transparent one; and the equating of a democratically elected parliament with an accessible one.³ The saying suggests that democracy is transparent and for this reason, a see-through federal parliament building exemplifies this transparency both in its workings and in its architecture.⁴ “He who builds a democracy makes a transparent society, government, and economy” would be an accurate inversion of the trope to delineate certain goals of postwar West German political renewal. Indeed, the move towards transparency lies at the heart of the Federal Republic: open public access to the political process especially to the elected representatives, active public participation in the political system, an open market economic system, a free press, and guaranteed civil liberties such as freedom to express one’s opinion, freedom of conscience, and freedom to dissent. But a drive towards transparency is not the same as transparency achieved. Rather, it is the expression of a desire, a goal, an ideal, but not the real state of things. The drive towards transparency, then, was a weapon against the past, intentionally incorporated into the West German constitution, the Basic Law, to militate against a potential relapse into totalitarianism, state-sponsored racism, and a closed society. Translated into architecture, this interest has evolved since the late 1940s into a dominant ideology for state buildings, especially the national parliaments, although neither the meaning intended by its proponents, nor the possible interpretations, have remained static over time.⁵

The three federal parliament buildings constructed since the Second World War, Hans Schwippert’s 1949 Bonn Bundeshaus, Günter Behnisch’s 1992 Bonn Bundeshaus, and Norman Foster’s 1999 renovation of the Berlin Reichstag, all exploit transparency as the principal architectural analogy (Figures 1.1, 1.2, and 1.3). They do so because the ideological thinking supporting transparency posits the new architecture as the antithesis of historic state buildings like the Reichstag, the embodiment of democratic values, and the symbol of the open society. Although Germany today is certainly an open society and a successful democracy, it is neither a transparent society nor a transparent democracy. In fact, a truly transparent society and democracy does not exist. Nor are the parliament and its workings transparent. The ideology supporting transparency has persisted in spite of these facts. Based on collective memory and consensus about what events should never be repeated, transparent government is supposed to act as a preventative measure, a guarantee. It offers the false hope that things and events that are visible are controllable. Transparency in architecture responds to a collective desire to forget on the part of West Germans feeling guilty about National Socialist excesses, and the desire to begin anew by creating a Stunde Null (Zero Hour); transparency is the basis for a new German myth.

The list of those advocating transparency—political, societal and architectural—as the foundation for the new order in West Germany is lengthy. It includes parliamentarians like Adolf Arndt, Carlo Schmid, and Theodor Heuss, and architects like Hans Schwippert, Paul Baumgarten, Sep Ruf, and Günter Behnisch. By 1970, even the parliamentary Building Committee believed it must mandate transparent architecture for the new Bundehaus and government complex in Bonn, a mandate repeated again and again thereafter including for the competition for the Reichstag renovation in the 1990s.⁶ If “he who builds transparently, builds democratically,” is taken as a hypothetical assertion applied to West German parliamentary architecture after the Second World War, the statement can be tested with a series of questions. Do those who build opaquely, build undemocratically? Is it possible to build transparently for a totalitarian or authoritarian regime? The answers to both questions seem obvious because so many constructed examples exist that refute each one. Opaque buildings are not necessarily undemocratic, and yes, it is possible to construct transparently for a totalitarian or authoritarian regime. Among the numerous examples of opaque, massive, monumental, democratic parliaments the American Capitol in Washington, DC, and the French Assemble Nationale in Paris stand out, while transparent buildings used to further undemocratic ideologies include Giusseppe Terragni’s masterpiece, the Casa del Fascio in Como built to support Italian Fascism, and the Palace of the Republic in East Berlin designed to promote the East German brand of Communism. If the hypothesis is so easy to disprove, why has it not only continued to be accepted in the Federal Republic but also gained wider and wider currency over the past 55 years?

Although easily proved false, “he who builds transparently, builds democratically,” does have buried in it some important facts about postwar German parliamentary architecture. The expression sets up a relationship between the political realm and meaning in state architecture, as well as between the concept of transparency in politics and in state buildings. It is here that the real interest lies since after the Second World War West German architects intentionally attempted to invent modern iconographic systems based on new formal, spatial, and stylistic models for the design of a national parliament. Transparency offered a convenient ideal to parliamentarians eager to distance West Germany from the Third Reich, Weimar Republic, and East Germany, and to architects equally determined to distance their work from the ideological and symbolic programs of the other regimes. In the case of each parliamentary project, the architect drew on the contemporary understanding of West German political identity as a source for architectural invention. And, in both the political and the architectural realms, transparency served as the agent that defined the parameters for action. Furthermore, the numerous parallels between notions of transparency in political identity and state architecture evolved over time, as West Germany progressed from a hopeful new state to a mature democracy. What the linkage between transparency and democracy does not address is the extent to which it establishes a false metaphor and false analogy for both the state and state architecture since neither is truly transparent. Myths by definition are rarely based on fact, but derive their strength from their emotional appeal to collective desires. In the case of West Germany after 1945, there was an overwhelming desire to be open and to be anything but what had come before. Transparency offers the hope that West Germans have achieved this collective goal of national reinvention.

1.1 The Bonn Bundeshaus as designed by Hans Schwippert, seen from the Rhine River in 1949. Schwippert Archiv, Germanisches Nationalmuseum, Nuremberg.

1.2 The Bonn Bundeshaus as designed by Günter Behnisch, seen from the Parliament Plaza in 1992. Bundesbildstelle Berlin.

I

Adolf Arndt, the distinguished German lawyer, member of the first Bundestag in 1949, Geschäftsfuhrer for the SPD from 1949 to 1963, and foremost legal expert in the SPD, repeatedly addressed the issue of building for democracy. In 1960 he delivered his most famous speech at the opening of the Berlin Building Week, Bauen für die Demokratie (Building for Democracy), a speech that has been republished repeatedly in West Germany since: in the architecture press (Bauwelt ran the speech in January 1961), in collections of essays about the new West German state, and in special single editions. In that and other speeches and essays, Arndt asked for a state architecture that at once demonstrated the spirit of the West German community and the spirit of the time—no mean feat in a country whose civil service was still dominated by former Nazis. Furthermore, it is significant that the speech was first delivered in Berlin with East Germany as backdrop and the memory of National Socialist excesses clearly motivating some of Arndt’s argument.⁷ In Arndt’s view, West Germany’s new democratic society was based on transparency. By this Arndt meant that West German society had open public access to its elected officials and to parliamentary proceedings, pluralism and individualism, freedom of expression and conscience, and popular participation in government. Because of his interpretation of West German democracy, Arndt called for transparency in state architecture as well.⁸ “Shouldn’t there be a connection between the public principles of democracy and inner and outer transparency and accessibility in our public buildings?”⁹ Arndt was convinced that West German democracy needed some sort of unique architectural expression. Speaking in the city Hitler and Speer once planned to redesign, where certain architectural remnants of their megalomania like the Reichsbank and the Aviation Ministry still stood, and where reminders of the Prussian monarchy and the Wilhelmine empire like Schloss Charlottenburg and the Reichstag also survived, the lack of a style for the new West Germany must have been all the more apparent. Interestingly, Arndt’s demand came 11 years after the architect Hans Schwippert identified transparent architecture as the most appropriate representation of West German democratic government, but long before the notion gained common currency among West German architects and parliamentarians.¹⁰ In his defense of the design for the Bundeshaus, Schwippert recognized the originality in his proposition. He claimed to have built the “first modern parliament”; to have anchored West German parliamentary architecture firmly in the present, the up-to-date, and the innovative.¹¹ By transparent architecture, both Schwippert and Arndt meant see-through glass structures whose visual accessibility could be understood as an analogy for the openness, accessibility, and egalitarianism to which the new Federal Republic aspired and whose architecture would promote greater public participation in government as well as help West Germans identify with democracy.

1.3 The renovated Reichstag as designed by Foster and Partners, seen from the West side. Bundesbildstelle Berlin.

While Schwippert’s and Arndt’s arguments were part of a larger postwar debate on the appropriate architectural style for post-Nazi Germany, a dispute that divided into two camps—those who favored the return to historic styles or regional traditions as a means of reconstructing confidence and historic continuity versus those who advocated the adoption of a contemporary style that would represent a clear break with the National Socialist past and link with the world-famous architecture of the Weimar Republic—transparency did not become a popular ideology until the 1980s. This is not to say that there were not dozens of state parliaments and town halls constructed from Achern (1964) to Ahlen (1977), from Dorsten (1957) to Bocholt (1978), whose primary material was glass rendering the envelope see-through in the proper light conditions. But the discourse supporting these physically transparent state buildings rarely equated transparency with democracy or the open society.¹² Only a handful of federal projects engaged in this discourse before the 1980s when the second parliament building, the Behnisch Bundeshaus, was being designed. The date of the first competition for the new Bundeshaus and government quarter in 1970 marks the beginning of transparency’s true ascendance in German architectural discourse.¹³ In that brief, the commissioning agent of parliament called for a transparent building whose design made parliament accessible to the public.¹⁴ The 1993 brief for the Reichstag renovation reveals the logic underlying calls for transparent building in the political realm. It refers to Article 42, Paragraph 1 of the German Basic Law that mandates open (offen) public access to the workings of government.¹⁵ The mandate to make the workings of government physically accessible was part of a larger Bill of Rights modeled on the American one that guaranteed an open society—free speech, freedom of conscience, free press, tolerance, and pluralism—qualities that Arndt and others associated with transparency in government and society. By the 1990s, many German parliamentarians clearly wished to believe that state architecture should symbolically reflect the political transparency called for in the constitution. Why did transparency become so important for the national parliament, but nowhere else? Most likely because it is the one building type closely connected with national political identity—the most visible public expression of the new Germany both nationally and internationally. In the years after the war, the FRG was extremely sensitive to how it was perceived abroad, particularly in the former occupying countries, Great Britain, France, and the United States. Local and state government buildings have a limited, mostly regional, audience whereas the national parliament has a presence both inside and outside the country.

II

The national parliament building is an important and potent political symbol of a democratic country like West Germany because it is the seat of government, the home of the constitution, and the place where law is debated and enacted. Yet there is no single form or style for parliament buildings or state buildings either in West Germany, or abroad. Indeed, there is no single form, spatial configuration, or style for democratic state architecture as differentiated from architecture associated with totalitarian, authoritarian, or any other governmental system. In Germany, there was no national parliament building before the late nineteenth century when the Reichstag was designed and constructed, although there was a succession of state parliaments and town halls dating back to the late Middle Ages and after 1663 the national assembly, the Reichstag, held its meetings in the newer section of the Regensburg Town Hall built in 1660.¹⁶ The Rathaus, or town hall, did not follow a uniform stylistic formula, rather the buildings were designed to fit prevailing architectural fashion, nationalistic ideologies of style, and local tastes, so that the Rathaus in Tangermünde (first half of the fifteenth century) was decidedly Gothic, rendered in brick adorned with bar tracery, rose windows, arched openings covered with tracery, astragals, and pinnacles while that in Frankfurt am Main (1624) was in a typical seventeenth century Rhineland style with stucco façades, steeply gabled roof supported by richly carved wooden members and gingerbread ornamentation in contrast to the town hall in Marburg that tried to express nineteenth-century bourgeois pride through its neo-gothic appearance.¹⁷ The lack of a uniform style did not mean that there were not elements c...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Illustration Credits
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Chapter 1: Transparency Ideology
• Chapter 2: Transparency In German Architecture Before and After the War
• Chapter 3: The Quest for an Open Society
• Chapter 4: Looking In the Mirror: Transparency After 1989
• Chapter 5: A Metaphor for the New Germany
• Chapter 6: House of Openness, Architecture of Encounter
• Chapter 7: Coming to Terms With the Past: Transparency In Norman Foster’s Reichstag
• Chapter 8: Why Transparency?
• Appendix 1: Biography of Hans Schwippert
• Appendix 2: Biography of Günter Behnisch
• Appendix 3: Biography of Norman Foster
• Appendix 4: “Happiness and Glass,” Hans Schwippert
• Notes
• Bibliography