The path to perfection and to all progress is continuing self-criticism.
(Kurt Schwitters)
1. The architecture is determined by the location and use determine architecture.
2. Wherever it forms humans’ living space, architecture must convey sensuousness.
3. The architect’s responsibility is always a public one as well.
4. Architecture is an extremely enduring and sustainable product and should not strive to comply with the zeitgeist, fashion or current market situations.
5. Results are best when responsibility is concentrated among a few minds.
The responsibility includes taking on a comprehensive range of tasks (finding a location, project management, construction and object supervision, through to artistic design).
Fields of activity such as project management and construction supervision (see range of services), which have been passed on by architects due to a lack of lucrativeness or competence must be ‘recaptured’. This is necessary in order to guarantee the quality of the product as a whole, which can also be – though it does not have to be – an architectural work of art and a work of building culture, by assuming interdisciplinary and overall responsibility.
In this context the loose concept of ‘building culture’ needs to be redefined.
The quality of a building, whether it is a valuable product of building culture, is not decided today according to criteria of the zeitgeist or fashion, but in 20-30 years in the enduring quality of its design and function.
Building culture is to cover the whole surface and not to retreat by focussing on a few highlights.
Often, however, restrained, but high quality design of the urban space does not satisfy one’s own vanity and the ego sufficiently.
The urban surface, which often presents itself as a kind of architectural ‘hotchpotch’, has been neglected far too much by architects due to economic pressures – which sometimes means nothing but uninhibited maximisation of returns, providing for bourgeois ideas of taste in what is called ‘customer orientation’ nowadays.
With a few prominent exceptions, under different omens, the planner has drifted into the role of a servant of the construction industry and finance companies (PPP model), just as once in the German Democratic Republic, where 'state combines' dictated the requirements. Decisions about the project to be realised are made not according to technical criteria, e.g. the criterion of sustainability, but according to considerations of momentary political and economic success. This becomes particularly perverse when structural engineering services are allocated on the basis of company tenders (the company changes, the architecture remains). In 20 years time we will have to bear the consequences.
Architects’ withdrawal to formal aesthetic aspects considered by the currently dominant zeitgeist (now deconstruction, now postmodernity etc.) or to short-term marketing strategies has ‑ in the long run ‑ led to a loss of competence and credibility. Particularly when in the same breath, for self-presentation reasons, construction history and the circumstances resulting from this are no longer granted the necessary respect.
This website is intended to provide an unembellished overview of our office’s service spectrum; it is not a glossy brochure reduced to success stories and colourful pictures, but hence this also contains qualitatively valuable failures and realised ‘flops’.