Senate Building Director: The new culture war over architecture in Berlin
ONEThe Kassel architectural theorist and former head of the Bauhaus Dessau Foundation Philipp Oswalt announced the appointment of Petra Kahlfeldt as the new Berlin Senate Building Director. In one Open letter mobilized, yes, he incites against them. Kahlfeldt is unsuitable for the office and the demands on urban planning of our time.
He defamed their great architectural features plantHe insinuates that mere people are made up of mansions. In the office run jointly with her husband Paul Kahlfeldt, the vast majority of the work consisted of the transformation and maintenance of existing buildings, prototypically the renovation of the high-rise on Fehrbelliner Platz, the official seat of the Berlin building administration. True, theoreticians don’t have to be able to build, but anyone who has as little practical experience as Philipp Oswalt should at least show respect to a practitioner with complex experience like Petra Kahlfeldt.
According to the cosmopolitan understanding, an affront is an insult because of one’s own interests. Oswalt seems to see himself, his taste and his views on architecture and the city set back. So what, one might say, that happens in a democracy where majorities change.
The case BECOMES interesting because a large number of architects and associations also signed the open letter. Including well-known architects such as HG Merz (who restored the State Library and Old National Gallery in Berlin), who did not sign as a private person, but for the Berlin Academy of the Arts. There are nobles like Ferdinand von Hohenzollern, Trutz von Stuckrad or Adrian von Buttlar, the Swiss architectural theorist Werner Oechslin and the former city councilor of Hamburg Jörn Walter.
A number of well-known architects such as Hilde Leon, Grüntuch-Ernst and Sauerbruch-Hutton, who were among the well-known protégés of the Senate Building Director Regula Lüscher, who resigned in the summer, have signed. Or Julia Dahlhaus, the chairwoman of the Association of German Architects (BDA) from Berlin, a professional representation with an elitist style. The members are co-opted according to the principle of excellence, a pre-democratic procedure of the ancestors, which the BDA maintains with proud self-image.
The latter in particular could be trusted if the new Senate Building Director Petra Kahlfeldt had not even been chairwoman of the Berlin BDA herself. Except that she made a row there because nepotism and nepotism were rampant. Kahlfeldt didn’t have to clean up the mess. That caused trouble and ended in her resignation. One is surprised that this association, instead of congratulating Petra Kahlfeldt on her new office, prefers to join the uprising against her.
Philipp Oswalt is also known as a notorious lateral thinker. He comes from the Frankfurt building contractor dynasty Holzmann and has been active as a journalist for more than 30 years, often with a high level of attention. He is an apologist for formlessness (Berlin – Stadt ohne Form, 2000), inventor of the project “rumpende cities”, highly valued by the German Federal Cultural Foundation in 2004, fan and connoisseur of the Bauhaus aesthetics, about which he has written a striking book. As chairman of the Bauhaus Dessau Foundation, he fell out with his employer Stephan Dorgerloh.
Then he succeeded as a deliberate savior of the Palace of the Republic (ZwischenPalastUnuse, 2004) and grew up to be a bitter opponent of the reconstruction of the Berlin Palace. However, that did not prevent him from taking part in the competition to rebuild this castle, including the baroque facades. Oswalt hates all reconstructions unless they concern Bauhaus modernism (such as the Barcelona pavilion and the Dessau pump room by Mies van der Rohe). As an eloquent rhetorician, he bears traits of the obsessive virtue of a Robespierre.
In the campaign against Petra Kahlfeldt he appears under the seal of transparency and demands that the office be advertised and that the person be judged by a jury. In plain language: He wants to draw state secretaries before a tribunal, which is of course announced as an “independent appeals committee”. That sounds fancy at first. But the tribunalization of state secretaries is a brazen piece of political intent. It is reminiscent of council democratic techniques of the revolutionary era and not only contradicts the customs, but clearly also the applicable laws of the Federal Republic.
Since 1996 state secretaries have been treated according to their own law, which regulates their tasks, duties and rights. Your appointment is made by the respective senator / minister. State secretaries are shop stewards who assist the political leaders in fulfilling their tasks, mostly within the administration. “The state secretaries can be dismissed by the Senate at any time”, it says succinctly in §3, 2 of the law. Colloquially, this is also a hot chair.
But this also means that Oswalt and his combatants call for breaking legal laws or mobilize to do so. Instead of looking for majorities in the parties and in the House of Representatives (parliament) for their requests to amend the law, they prefer to ride a campaign. That is easier. But THEY use techniques of a populism that is fueled from the left or the right by today’s possibilities of digital communication.
An-Lin Ngo, editor-in-chief of “Bow +”, the hometown of Phillip Oswalt, the appointment of Petra Kahlfeldt. Ngo and Oswalt hypocritically fear what they themselves force: the ideologization of Berlin’s urban planning policy. Disarm, create peace instead of arms, that’s what one would like to call out to them. It was Christmas right now.
Gerwin Zohlen is the managing director of the architecture and art book publisher Wasmuth & Zohlen.