Berlin's edifice complex
Well before the new U.S. Embassy here officially opened in a soggy (outdoor and uncovered) Fourth of July celebration that featured hors d'oeuvres from McDonald's and Dunkin' Donuts, German critics had roundly savaged the building as an architectural disaster.
Last May, the daily Süddeutsche Zeitung called it "Ft. Knox at the Brandenburg Gate." Der Tagesspiegel pronounced it a "triumph of banality." Particularly offended by the embassy's windows, the critic at the conservative Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung contended that they "look as if a bankrupt homeowner had bought them in a home-improvement store near Fargo in order to get his house ready for winter." Die Welt, meanwhile, stated simply that "only the Chinese Embassy is uglier."
I suppose that all is fair in love and criticism, but you'd be naive to think that the vehemence of this response was driven solely by an all-embracing love for architectural aesthetics. I'm not going to defend the building. To my untrained eye, it's a bland, nondescript, mostly functional building whose designers -- Santa Monica-based Moore Ruble Yudell -- were lumbered by the dual burdens of heightened security risks and the fact that the site, sandwiched between the Holocaust Memorial and the iconic Brandenburg Gate (in front of which President Reagan gave his "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall" speech), is one of the most symbolically charged pieces of real estate in Europe.
Does the new, sandstone embassy carry the weight of this environment? Does it somehow speak "American" to Germany's Nazi past, its years of division, its vibrant present and future? Not to my mind. It might be fine as a headquarters of a biotech firm in, say, suburban California, but it in no way resonates with the profound moral and historical symbolism of its surroundings. But is the structure some sort of crime against humanity, or at least against the people of Berlin? I don't see it.
With some notable exceptions, architecture in Berlin -- even during the post-unification building boom -- has a reputation for sobriety, not wild imagination. "Building is a particularly charged endeavor here," Kristien Ring, the director of the German Architecture Center, told me. "History must be referred to, used as a point of context, and then distanced."
The best examples of this dynamic at work include British architect Norman Foster's masterful redesign of the Reichstag, whose metal and glass dome filters light -- and symbolically, transparency -- down to the Parliament floor below.
