WHY DO YOU BUILD THINGS, ANYWAY?

What form does architecture take in an era of societal transformation and sustainable construction? And what role does participation play in the search for future-facing living spaces? We talked to Markus Allmann, founder of the Munich-based architects’ office allmannwappner.

MARKUS

ALLMANN

The breakthrough came from winning a competition: the multiple award-winning design for the Samuel-von-Pufendorf-Gymnasium school in Flöha dates from 1996 but still looks fresh today, an authentic place of encounter. The architects at Allmann Sattler Wappner designed housing (including the Haus der Gegenwart—House of the Present—for publisher Süddeutscher Verlag), delivered urban planning projects and spectacular churches (including the vast glass-fronted Herz Jesu in the Neuhausen district of Munich, described by the first priest to take office there as a Porsche among churches), company headquarters (like the metal-framed headquarters of the Südwestmetall employers’ association) and shopping centres (including a snowy white makeover for the Stachus underground shopping mall in the heart of Munich).

Today the office has around 160 employees and receives most of its commissions from competitions. Since the departure of Amandus Sattler, Markus Allmann, Ludwig Wappner and Frank Karlheim have continued to operate under the name of allmannwappner since early 2022. They have continued to espouse competitions as the best form of inspiring ideas. An old factory pre­mises on Nymphenburger Strasse in the west of Munich serves as the engine-room of ideas, with Markus Allmann at the helm.

Architecture is supposed to be the universal connector: sustainable, participatory, communicative and open, but simultaneously complying with all standards, rules and regulations. Isn’t that a bit much?

 

M

A

It certainly is a lot, and it’s become too much for one individual player to handle. It’s easier in a team, where there are advocates for individual themes and architecture is created from the dialogue between them. There is no black-and-white mindset. Ultimately, architecture grows as a trade-off between opposite poles. And this dialectical process, taking opposites as a basis for distilling out the right solution for specific users and specific places in a constructive, critical and clever way—this is what drives teams of architects. Increasingly hampered by all kinds of regulations, by production conditions where specialists call the shots, and by the diktat of cost-cutting, architects are increasingly required to justify their actions—even down to the fundamental question: Why do you build things, anyway? At the moment there is a kind of wave of non-building, of players declaring their objective of building as little as possible. It’s a remarkable de­ve­lopment. Given that architects basically desire to change our ­living environment by building, the current state of affairs almost amounts to a kind of self-harm. And if we do build, we have the need to reconcile with nature, resulting in the integration of natural elements into our architecture as highly emblematic gestures…

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like vertical forests…

 

M

A

...Yes, or façade greening; all those bells and whistles that are currently so indispensable in competition entries. We need to approach them more critically. In any case, research into biocomposites as building materials is far more exciting than all those completely meaningless quasi-ecological smokescreens. After all, building has never been anything else than against nature. Even if I build along organic principles, I might be imitating natural forms but I’m still working against nature, and cultural appropriation of space means loss of nature.

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Does that also apply to the cradle-­to-cradle concept of reusing materials and designing houses for maximum ease of deconstruction or change?

 

M

A

That’s also an area where honesty is the issue. Many projects only appear to be carbon-neutral. There needs to be more scrutiny of certification systems that feed into themselves and cause construction costs to soar. Of course, material concepts that save on resources and the issue of deconstruction must be given priority. Architects face the virtually insoluble contradiction of finding a balance between all these considerations. When we build, we destroy nature. So we should actually take on the role of advocates for existing living spaces, not necessarily be drivers of new production.

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A genuine paradigm shift: clear-­sighted building on what’s already there.

 

M

A

In Cologne we basically deconstructed the cathedral square, clearing it up and working on the principle of taking away, not ­adding. In terms of our fees, it was a complete contradiction because as architects, our fees are calculated based on the costs of building—but how do you calculate fees for not building? Not building still takes time, changes society and is a productive process; but it’s irreconcilable with HOAI, the architects’ fee schedule in Germany because HOAI is based on the idea of the more that gets built, the higher the fee.

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That fee schedule dates from the modernist period with a philosophy of higher, faster, further. But what about sufficiency? Will we use high tech to compensate for the consequences of past developments, fully aware that we may be opening the door to other problems in doing so? Or will we choose a reductive approach and produce something durable without major technology, and live more frugally?

 

M

A

Salvation won’t come from frugality and reduction alone. I still believe that technologies and innovations are what will lead us to better living spaces. Just look at history, where precisely that has happened. The progress and developments made in building and construction technology in the past centuries alone were what enabled our living spaces to be densified as population levels exploded. Back to the sod is a naïve view. Land is getting scarcer and populations are continuing to grow, so we need the technologies of the future. There’s no point in relying on moderation alone—though having said that, at the same time we need to think about quality-­based reduction of our living space and a certain level of frugality.

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So what role does architecture play in this?

 

M

A

Architecture has to propose spatial solutions to social issues. I always see architecture as an example of contrapposto—a term used in sculpture to describe a pose where the engaged and the free leg are in relation, expressing stillness and motion, tension and relaxation. Architecture has its systems of order and its specific rules, but it also has freedoms which reflect those rules and question those systems in a similar manner to contrapposto. Architecture cannot serve a single concept, but must always work in both directions, simultaneously confirming and questioning. The solutions can be found more at micro-political level, a scope that we can still grasp and understand. It would be presumptuous to seek to survey the big picture and all its impacts. In addition, the justified demand for resilience and sufficiency generates a certain frustration and exhaustion, given the limited possibility of achieving it in practice. Talking the talk is easy, but walking the walk turns out to be enormously difficult.

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So on the one hand, architecture has a revolutionary and iconoclastic momentum, which shakes up the system of order within which we move and unlocks areas of new possibilities. Yet on the other, it is compelled to act on a small scale and grind away on existing building stock. How can all that be captured and communicated?

 

M

A

The revolutionary aspect—if it can be called that—may be process-related, not necess­arily visible. There are players and groupings of players currently doing things that may not be outstanding in terms of formal aesthetics, but that unlock completely different areas of potential with respect to their social impact and social involvement. The customary status of architecture in the past, as a history of top-down decisions, is currently undergoing scrutiny. And interestingly enough, on closer inspection those new groupings and processes are very much spawning results that are innovative in terms of form, basically because instead of pursuing their own solitary ideas, people are opening themselves up to something else—jumping into a ­river, letting themselves be swept along and sticking their heads out of water to see where the journey’s going. The end result is more interesting than anything I could come up with on my own, hidebound by my personal specific specialisms. I think that’s exciting.

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Once, architects who had won a competition could dictate that everything would be done in exactly that way—captured by Le Corbusier’s godlike gesture of the hand over a model of Paris that he was planning to completely redesign. Is that era now over?

 

M

A

Of course the thought of having sole power to redesign at will is seductive. Any architect of any ambition that professed no desire to see their own ideas made reality would simply be lying, and some of the most outstanding architectural eras have been shaped by this attitude over the centuries. At the same time, one should be smart enough to realise that the age in which heroic architects owed a duty solely to themselves and their ideals is now past and gone. Having said that, there are still some autocrats and dictators who are in need of those services.

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