Williamsburg in Downtown Frankfurt, Germany?

Of all the European cities Frankfurt on the Main is the most American ("Mainhattan") with its cluster of high-rise towers sprouting downtown, a rarity on a continent that is quite skeptical when it comes to skyscrapers. Now Frankfurt has another American feature, a newly reconstructed "old" town  much like colonial Williamsburg, hardly more authentic than the Eiffel tower in Las Vegas its critics say.

Reconstructed Altstadt Frankfurt/Main: Completed in 2018

In a country that puts much stock into "honesty" the architectural masquerade which was completed earlier this year re-ignited  a debate among architects and urban planners which surges in waves starting right after WW II and continues today. The war had left many historic German cities in rubble. The reconstruction debate reached a crescendo with the plans to tear down the east German parliament building and reconstruct "the Stadtschloss" in Berlin. The castle was rebuilt and monarchy followed socialism, neither a particularly good representation of a democratic republic, even if the back of the new old Stadtschloss has a modern facade. The debate repeats with the ongoing reconstruction of the historic core of Potsdam, also in the former East Germany, home of the emperor's former summer residence near Berlin. Now Frankfurt. The arguments among the professionals remain explosive and include the biggest club in the arsenal, the accusation of being fascist or, at least, enable fascist and reactionary populism. Frankfurt, always more like London than Paris, is an interesting locus for the debate: Leftist protest in 1968 centered around gentrification and the demolition for a new subway line. Protesters then liked to use the bank headquarters as a backdrop for their stand against international capitalism. Now the left sees a right wing agenda behind reconstructed architecture.

Pros and cons around the plan, to create residential buildings on the medieval plots, Alleys and squares which summon up the destroyed the Alt Frankfurtsummon yet will be visually contemporary buildings repeat the debate that broke loose in 1947 in Frankfurt when the destroyed Birthplace of Johann Wolfgang Goethe was proposed to bee reconstructed Like then, reconstruction is either ostracized as a lie or idealized as fidelity to history. Just as in those days,

Reconstructed Raleigh Tavern, Williamsburg

architects who trace the historical design language are being defamed as hopeless yesterday's Romantics, as in those days, those who formally execute the radical break, are celebrated as guardians of progress and truth. For more than sixty years, this melange of intellectual lethargy, bias and dogmatism dominated the building process in Frankfurt and almost everywhere in the republic. Dieter Bartetzko, 2014, „Architekturstadt Frankfurt –Wegweisende Bauten, aktuelle Tendenzen“,Belserverlag, 2014.

The new altstadt painstakingly rebuilt the town centre – razed by Allied bombing in 1944 – based on its original layout on a large swath of land that had previously been occupied by an unloved exposed concrete (brutalist) local government building sitting on an underground garage and a subway station. Fifteen buildings were reconstructed on top of the garage using historical drawings and photographs, 20 new were built using traditional architectural styles as a collage (Collage City, Collin Rowe) including rescued materials. The construction of the garage and local government building in 1972-4 had actually destroyed dozens of intact medieval basements which had survived the bombings and could have given reconstruction an authentic foundation. The 70s plinth proved to be a formidable challenge during the demolition of the government building since the garage tends to get buoyed by groundwater especially when the dead-load on top gets reduced. The path from demolition to reconstruction didn't occur on a straight line.

2007 masterplan

There were at least two competitions and concepts for development, neither proposing literal reconstruction. How the jury selected plans grew into Williamsburg is now the topic of much political analysis noting that the impetus for literal reconstruction came from a right wing citizen initiative led by a member who was on the city council for the radically right AfD party. The literal reconstruction as it was completed now has not only run into political headwinds but also frequently headlong against current building code requirements. However, in the hands of a private development consortium, propelled by the prospect of sound profits, the project moved  along, nevertheless. The reconstruction follows and example set in the early 80s in the same area: Six excessively half-timbered buildings erected right across the "Römer" city hall, popular ever since.

Tour guide in front of reconstructed half timbered house

The Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung ("FAZ") has in Germany a similar standing as the New York Times here.  In it architectural theorist and professor Dr. Trüby diagnosed that "reconstruction architecture in Germany has become a key medium for authoritarian, populist history revisionists of the right wing." The left leaning theory paper ARCH+ for which the professor regularly writes, took his analysis to the next level and issued a petition titled  "against anti-modern architecture populism" in which it suggests the creation of a "reconstruction watch" group. Trüby also made an equity argument, pointing to the cost of the dwellings in the reconstruction in the context of an overall housing crisis in Frankfurt and the loveless architecture of the low income housing districts surrounding the City in what around Paris is known as the Banlieue.

The reconstruction architecture is currently becoming a key medium for the authoritarian, populist and history revising extreme right in Germany (Trüby) 

ARCH+ had been created in 1968, to give architecture an intellectual Uberbau when the student revolt was in full swing and the intelligentsia dug up Karl Marx and his anti capitalistic economic theory. Now the magazine collected signatures from 1095 well known architects, designers and opinion leaders for its petition. It can be found on Change.org.

the 1972 Technisches Rathaus government building
with historic foundation walls in the foreground

Frankfurt, of course, is not only a historical place of commerce and trade but also the home of the "Frankfurt School" of philosophy led to fame by Juergen Habermas who in a speech at the German National Library in Frankfurt said about his elected hometown:

Frankfurt is not a city which attracts the flaneur through its beauty. One has to live here. But than [the city] gains the affection of its citizens through the openness, the transitional and the unpretentiousness of the conflicts which take place in it, creating contacts, and colliding ideas. The city of Frankfurt owes its image to a rough and unveiled intellectualism which is open to the attractions and discord of the modern age which is rich in tension." 

Trüby could have used this quote to point out how the faux old-town replaces that tension with the cliche of medieval wholesomeness.

Meanwhile, the public just loves their old newtown, or the new oldtown, however one wants to put it. Visitors don't care one iota how authentic this is or whether architecture professor Stephan Trüby wrote a polemic in the Frankfurt daily or what Habermas may think.

Americans, would find the seriousness of the debate and the heft of its armament perplexing. Architecture isn't big news here, faux or not and urban planning rarely a topic of philosophical discourse. But Germans cultivate their newspapers even in the age of the Internet and their "style" section ("Feuilleton") is a place where art and culture get a lot of space. The Germans are serious people, too, and honesty and truth is always high on their value list, even if that truth is uncomfortable or plainly offensive. The German horrors of WW II have rather deepened those convictions than eliminating them. But architecture students learn in school that architecture should be honest and that it can easily be abused as an expression of ideology. Ever since Hitler declared the Bauhaus  and its architecture "un-German" in his unholy war against "degenerated art", which made various famous architects of the time find a new home in the US (Mies van der Rohe), the flat roof, modernism and Corbusian raw concrete (beton brut) have become symbols for an open society while half timbered houses with steep roofs and deep overhangs (Hitler's preference, he was Austrian after all) remain suspicious. American culture doesn't mind to please, movies here require a happy ending and museums or orchestras like to present blockbusters, all things German culture finds suspicious.

The view of the Altstadt from a highise tower observation deck

An observer of both worlds would occasionally wish for more depth on the American side and more relaxed goings on the German side. The US architect Robert Venturi who died this week, taught architects to learn from the faux and the populist hits by neither imitating them exactly ("Main Street is almost right") nor by looking down one's nose. "Learning from Las Vegas" was written the same year the Frankfurt Technisches Rathaus had its groundbreaking in 1972.

In light of  the right wing AfD party now sitting in the German Parliament and neo-nazis roaming through the German city of Chemnitz shouting ugly slogans and chasing anyone who looked like a foreigner, vigilance against a strengthened radical right is certainly in order. But is Frankfurt's own little Williamsburg really the place to locate and fight the dangerous animus? If architectural reconstruction could ever harbor such power, the vigilant eye should stay trained on places like Berlin where fascism's power had its original locus along with its imperial enablers and where real castles are now being reconstructed.

It helps to also put the debate into a context of urban design and its big postwar failures. The fear that remainders of quaint old towns could harbor fascist ideology was strong in Germany. Many thought that when much of the historic substance in cities like Frankfurt, Hanover and Stuttgart had been destroyed it was modern and good to continue the eradication after the war in the name of a new era just like in the era of US urban renewal.  However, there is almost universal recognition, even among architects, that what was built as replacement was rarely excellent and was mostly just a way of making the automobile king. As a result Stuttgart, Hanover and also Frankfurt are widely regarded as rather ugly cities, except for the beauty of their natural setting and whatever islands of history they had left.  Frankfurt recently regained architectural stature through some of its more interesting high rises.

Staatsgallerie Stuttgart: James Stirling

A little local skirmish between two architects is telling. The late, Stuttgart based architect Gunther Behnisch swung the fascism club some 40 years ago when he had lost the design competition for an addition to Stuttgart's art museum Staatsgalerie to James Sterling. The British architect's Staatsgalerie project went on to become world famous as an example of museum architecture putting a city "on the map" long before Gehry's Guggenheim in Bilbao. Behnisch went on to get a commission to design a new glassy building for the German Bundestag in Bonn. When that was completed, Germany united and the government moved to Berlin where Stirling's fellow countryman Norman Foster  went on to reconstruct the historic Reichstag building, famously adding a glass cupola.  There is a lot of irony in this chain of events, just as in Sterling's architecture with its many tongue in cheek "quotations". Sterling's play with roman architecture was fascist for Behnisch to whom democratic authenticity was the transparency of glass. While this story from 1979 is long forgotten, it provides a suitable subtext for the Frankfurt-Williamsburg debate.

Berlin Reichstag with Foster Dome

Relax, one wants to admonish the combatants in the German architecture magazines and feuilleton pages. Frankfurt can survive the more or less faux 35 dollhouses. In fact, the visual connections and spatial qualities of the new ensemble along with its own set of architectural quotations and tensions make this experiment worthwhile and probably less trite than whatever post modern reconstruction would have been. The most plausible alternative, adaptive reuse of the 1972 brutalist superstructure, had been rejected and made impossible through demolition.

Just like in blockbuster Williamsburg, few tourists will question whether the new old town is true history. In time it will be.

Klaus Philipsen, FAIA

related links:
ArchDaily 2015: What’s Behind Europe’s Grandiose Rebuilding?
Frankfurter Neue Presse

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