sauerbruch hutton: open box
exhibitionAn installation designed for the aut with models from 30 years of the Berlin-based and internationally active architecture office.
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Kaye Geipel: 6 notes on the work of sauerbruch hutton
This text by Kaye Geipel was first published in Arquitectura Viva in English and Spanish (AV Monografias 251, Sauerbruch Hutton Urban Nature, 2023).
When I corresponded with Louisa Hutton a few weeks ago, she sent me a photograph from the trip she was on showing red and yellow leaves lying on the ground, with a thick film of moving water washing over them. Its vividness and depth make it an unusual picture. I think of the three-dimensionality of Japanese gardens and the subtle tiering of their spaces in spite of the tiny areas they occupy. The photograph clarifies something about how the work of architects Sauerbruch Hutton ties in with their vision. It was taken in a garden adjacent to Heidi Weber’s Le Corbusier Pavilion in Zurich; Sauerbruch Hutton are working on the other side of the city on the site of the former Maag cogwheel factory. The image suggests a sideways movement, a movement that responds to the atmospheric forces of the environment.
(1) the colours of the city
This design principle is also used for other projects; it is applied on scales both small and large, from mundane details that are scarcely worth mentioning to the characteristic features of urban architecture. Sauerbruch Hutton’s feeling out of local details is helpful in clarifying a misunderstanding that has been frequently expressed about the colourful, shimmering facades that have for many years been regarded as a signature element of their architecture. They are seen as artificial statements of the Berlin office, as their characteristic stamp. The opposite is true. In each case, the colouring, scale, and depth of these built surfaces emerge from a process of patient engagement with the individual setting. Much more than a statement, they are an unfolding of a quality that is already there. When I asked the architects, “Do cities have colours too?,” they responded by talking about how they explore the chromatic characteristics of cities in their research. The local building history is manifested in a special amalgam of distinctive regional materials and colours, a factor that has rarely been addressed in architectural history.
Sauerbruch Hutton’s use of colour is always an individual response to the haptic and visual surfaces of the urban neighbourhoods in which they build. An example here is the “Sthlm 01” office tower in Stockholm, which was completed in 2020: the red sections of the facade running vertically up the building can be seen as a reference to the particular Falu red of Sweden’s wooden houses. Another example, this time operating on the horizontal plane, are the gleaming green and yellow bands of the parapets in Helsinki’s new Airut neighbourhood, which bring to mind the chromatic range of the old container port. Yet another is the polychromatic patchwork design of Paris’s ZAC Claude Bernard quarter, which reflects a range of different influences: here, the city centre meets the adjoining municipality of Aubervilliers to the north, home to over forty different nationalities.
(2) what can architecture do?
Discussing how we conceive the city when we build – the question of what ideas we have in mind when we talk or argue about the European city today – invariably provides information about the sort of society in which we want to live. The reconstruction of inner cities has been part of the process of financialization: prompted by the doctrines of neoliberal development, it has had a narcotic effect on the urgency of this question in recent years and left the task of answering it to the market. The concept of the European city got caught in the clutches of a conservative cultural policy, which resulted in a formulaic, historicist approach to architecture.
But even in places where municipal policymakers have tried to create forward-looking points of identification for an open urban society expressed in cultural buildings, museums, and libraries, the resulting architecture has rarely been a success. This has often been attributed to the Bilbao effect, which even small cities have sought to emulate in an attempt, under pressure, to market themselves. The creation of architecture that was as loud and attention-grabbing as possible shifted the balance between the goal of upgrading local neighbourhoods and the idea of attracting people from across the country and, indeed, abroad; this tilted sharply toward the practices of global tourism.
What options does architecture have for freeing itself from such forces? The M9 museum district in Mestre is a prime example of the power that architecture has, a demonstration of how a European building ensemble can make a bit of the city available to its inhabitants again with the help of a cultural quarter. The buildings by Sauerbruch Hutton are located at the heart of the city centre. The densely built-up area had a heterogeneous composition – a mix, in part, of medieval buildings and structures dating from the sixties and seventies – and had previously been occupied by the Italian military. A former convent lay to the north. An international competition was announced, which Sauerbruch Hutton won in 2010.
The office’s design gives visible expression to the kind of sustainable strategies available to cities in a ‘post-Bilbao’ era that will allow them to upgrade their fabric without falling into the trap of conservative re-historicization. An analysis of the success of M9 reveals two reasons for it, in particular: the design develops from a systematic review of the urban building fabric – long before this strategy became a required part of the Urban Reuse movement. It takes this “as found” quality as its conceptual starting point. The individual fragments, which are fairly unremarkable in themselves, are examined to see whether they can be combined – in terms of their three-dimensional form and materiality – to create a new, porous urban fabric. Adopting this approach – with the design direction heading, as it were, from the existing substance into something new – the architects have succeeded in creating space in the renovated old buildings in the immediate vicinity to accommodate a local small-scale commercial structure located directly adjacent to the museum. This creates a dynamic synergy between the new cultural functions and established local businesses.
The second, equally important point is that Sauerbruch Hutton have sited the two large new museum buildings so that they fit snugly into the existing urban structure, without leaving a swathe of empty space around them, which would have put them on display. The element of surprise is amplified by the sudden encounter, amid the alleys separating the newly assembled city fragments, with the museum’s red, grey, and white glazed ceramic walls, which rise up as if from nowhere and mirror the brick reds of the surroundings. The architecture’s approachable quality means that the M9 museum district is also an aesthetic object lesson in how a European city can be further developed. Its self-assured confidence that it can be great even when hidden conveys an important message for “urban reuse” projects of the future.
(3) the importance of drawing
In 2020, I conducted an interview, in several parts, with Louisa Hutton, Matthias Sauerbruch, and Juan Lucas Young to discuss their work and design methods. The publication on Bauwelt that came out of this was illustrated with sketches, collages, and paintings by the architects showing both realized and unrealized projects. The importance that these images and drawings have for Sauerbruch Hutton can be clearly seen on the walls of their Berlin office, where the development of their ideas across a period of more than thirty years is evident in a series of different-sized – sometimes as 2- by 2-meter collages, sometimes as quick haiku-like sketches. It presents a cross section of their work.
As I looked at these drawings again and again, I wondered what function they fulfil within the framework of the architects’ design work and what they have in common in spite of their different formats. For one thing, sketching an idea in colour is an autonomous medium that can be used to capture the essence of the architecture at the start of the design work. For Sauerbruch Hutton a salient feature of these drawings is the way they dynamize urban space, injecting movement into the territory of the city, which can be successfully rendered in a large sketch. It seems as if the site where the architecture will stand is first orbited, in a movement that picks up on existing topographical lines and the infrastructural elements as well as on buildings from the outside in. Then, in a reverse movement, this existing network of urban relationships is viewed from the inside looking out, and new ideas are added. These two movements are never completely congruent in the drawing – the lines and areas of colour leave the new architecture open to interpretation.
What makes this drawing technique so suggestive is the way it shimmers: this means that the architecture is not determined as a set of fixed objects but is rather the subject of a roving gaze, mimicking the experience a person has when they use the buildings. This is the case whether you’re looking at a body-sized collage of the spiral-shaped plateaux of the Experimenta Science Centre in Heilbronn – presumably made in a late phase of the construction process – or the sketches of the public spaces around the ADAC administrative building in Munich. The drawing is never quite finished but remains in motion. It has an inherent dynamic tension, revealing fields of force, and thus lends itself to expounding the possibilities of future architecture.
(4) political engagement
More than any other of Sauerbruch Hutton’s buildings, the GSW high-rise in Berlin Kreuzberg reflects the approach taken by the architects – who were making the move from London to Berlin at the time – and signals their arrival in the city, which was in a state of transition in the early 1990s following the fall of the Wall. To this day, it remains the most important witness to the explorations of a young group of architects who were not satisfied with the conservative doctrine of the Senate’s Building Director, which took the 19th-century version of the city as its model.
Why the GSW ensemble has become so central to Berlin’s history since the fall of the Wall has to do with its architectural optimism, which continues to resonate today. It is not simply a manifesto of a young generation of architects who made a stand against the historicist reconstruction of Berlin. It is also a statement about how a common architectural language can be developed from the scarred urban layout of the formerly divided city with its clearly visible, contradictory architectural histories – in this case, the high-rise modernism along Leipziger Strasse in East Berlin and the IBA in Kreuzberg in West Berlin.
How much effort the architects put into this building – and how close the headwinds of political resistance came to making it fail – is documented from various perspectives in a book published by the architects to mark the thirtieth anniversary of the opening of their practice (The Turn of the Century: A Reader about Architecture in Europe 1990-2020). The chequered history of the building demonstrates something else, however. Since the start of their career, the architects at Sauerbruch Hutton have always taken a close-up view of the problems facing the cities in which they design. They do not skirt around the conflicts involved in the radical renewal of central inner-city areas. In a debate on the future of the European city, Matthias Sauerbruch identified the essential productive conflict: “In most cases, we are not dealing with a tabula rasa but with urban fragments. It should be possible to classify them and complete them as a matter of necessity – reconstruct them even, where this seems to make sense. But in many cases, new questions come up that have yet to be resolved. Then, one of the architect’s core competences is called upon: the capacity to bring together contradictory demands that are mired in conflict so as to synthesize a new reality that also has sensual qualities” (‘Die Europäische Stadteine Chimäre?, Stadtbauwelt 205, 2015).
(5) designing in a time of crises
Given the multitude of overlapping crises whose effects impact the work architects do and the way they see themselves, there is a great temptation to go into a state of shock and defend the discipline’s tunnel vision. The housing crisis has generated a deafening political clamour for affordable homes, the upshot of which is that the ambition to realize architectural and urban qualities that were taken for granted in the postwar period has been pushed way down the agenda; while the Covid crisis has sparked a debate on community spaces and care architecture that has relegated the question of how to design public space around new buildings to the back burner. Lastly, the war in Ukraine has not merely confronted Europe with an unprecedented energy issue, it has also turned the total destruction of cities a few hundred kilometres away into a present-day reality.
If we look back at Sauerbruch Hutton’s buildings over the past thirty years with an awareness of this narrowing window ahead of us, their work has an unswerving quality in its commitment to forward movement. They hold firm to principles and keep developing them in an iterative learning process. Sauerbruch and Hutton themselves speak of “first principles,” by which they mean not typologies but an open methodology that enables their design work to engage more closely with the questions posed by the existing situation.
The best demonstration of this is their approach to the climate crisis and CO2 avoidance, which has been a crucial factor in their designs since the GSW high-rise in Berlin. The story began in the 1990s with their effort to minimize the ecological footprint of their buildings by reducing red energy. With the German Environment Agency in Dessau, active and passive measures to reduce energy consumption were combined in an exemplary way. At the end of the noughties, the focus was on identifying how much grey energy is contained in existing structures – energy that is necessarily destroyed whenever new buildings are constructed in their place. Sauerbruch Hutton set out a clear alternative in their pioneering Munich project, the refurbishment of Munich Re. Today, the perspective has broadened to include systemic design processes that take account of material cycles on an urban scale. On the one hand, the architects have specifically opted for new timber construction where it makes sense (for example, in Geneva’s Médecins Sans Frontières, or in Hamburg’s Universal Design Quarter in Wilhelmsburg). On the other, they also pursue the approach of continuing to build rather than demolishing, which they also apply in the context of large neighbourhood projects (such as Maaglive on the Maag site in Zurich).
With its hundred-strong staff, Sauerbruch Hutton is a major player at the European level in the debates surrounding architecture. The Berlin office’s ability to respond to existing features and conflicts and – by understanding the city as an all-embracing set of cultural conditions – translate them, subject to the location, into a distinctive architectural form now makes it one of the most important European exemplars modelling ways of tackling the current crises we face. Their buildings develop out of more than thirty years of searching for the “well-being in a place”, expanded to encompass a multifaceted, polyphonic mode of articulation – which, incidentally, also includes their extraordinary new office structure with nineteen partners.
(6) gesture and rationality
For me, the neatest description of what constitutes the core of Sauerbruch Hutton’s design work comes from Harun Farocki, who made a film about the architects in 2013. Farocki, who reflected time and again on the heteronomous nature of today’s work processes, has reminded us recently that designing cannot just be about efficiency. “I like their buildings. They are tuned so as to be ecologically efficient, yet at the same time they are extravagant with ideas. They are playful without any sense of arbitrariness.” Sauerbruch Hutton’s design process develops in the balance between play, gesture, and efficient rationality; in between lies a generosity in the will to go all out that characterizes their architecture.
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