Philip Johnson House

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Coordinates: 52 ° 30 ′ 32.6 "  N , 13 ° 23 ′ 21.4"  E

Philip Johnson House: rear facade on Bethlehemkirchplatz , with the sculpture Houseball on it

The Philip Johnson house is a 1997 on the site of the former border crossing " Checkpoint Charlie " at Friedrichstrasse 200 in Berlin district of Mitte finished office building. It is named after the New York architect Philip Johnson , who designed it and built it together with the Berlin architects Pysall, Stahrenberg und Partner . The house was one of Johnson's last projects, an important representative of the international style and postmodernism , and is part of the American Business Center, which is planned with five buildings .

location

The free-standing Philip Johnson House is surrounded by Friedrichstrasse, Schützenstrasse, Wall Street and Krausenstrasse . There is little between the building and the Wall Street Bethlehem Church Square , named after the 1943 destroyed Bethlehem Church . On it stands the sculpture Houseball by Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen , which came here via intermediate stops in Bonn and Rostock . This spherical Pop Art sculpture depicts a household made of furniture and other items that are tied in a bundle.

Before the Second World War, there were residential and commercial buildings on the site between Bethlehem Church and Friedrichstrasse (Block 106 of Friedrichstrasse). In one of these houses the butcher Loewenthal made the first sausages for the landlord Roland Scholz in 1889 . During the war, the buildings were badly damaged by Allied air raids and later demolished. Until German reunification , the site and its surroundings were in close proximity to the Berlin Wall in East Berlin . Parts of the border control systems at Checkpoint Charlie were located here. After the border system was demolished in 1990/1991, the site lay fallow.

history

The American billionaire Ronald Lauder and his partner Mark Palmer, the former ambassador of the United States in Hungary , developed the idea of ​​an American business center in Berlin, into which hundreds of American companies would move and 3,500 jobs would be created. They chose the land at the former “Checkpoint Charlie” as the location. During a ceremony to mark the start of the project on October 2, 1992, Berlin's then Governing Mayor Eberhard Diepgen described the project as an “important signal of hope and confidence”. After lengthy negotiations with the descendants of former Jewish owners of the New York land, construction began in 1994.

Five office buildings were planned in blocks 105, 106, 200, 201a and 201b. A total of 160,000 m² gross floor area should be created. A different team of architects was responsible for each building, and apart from Johnson, whom Lauder commissioned directly, they were determined in four limited architecture competitions in 1992. The American David Childs from SOM won the competition for Block 200. The other three orders went to teams of architects from Berlin, Munich and Frankfurt. Philip Johnson had downsized his New York office in 1993 and was 87 years old. During the Weimar Republic he had spent about three years in Berlin and had previously worked in Germany with the Kunsthalle Bielefeld .

Only three of the five drafts of the business center were implemented. Blocks 105 and 200 remained undeveloped; In 2004 the controversial freedom memorial of the working group August 13th stood on Block 105 . After the building was completed in 1997, the embassies of Ireland , Singapore and temporarily also Australia moved in , although they have all moved out again. Other areas are used by different companies. This includes the car rental company Rent-A-Car .

The Allianz Real Estate Germany in 2011 acquired the office and commercial building.

layout

Philip Johnson House: Entrance on Friedrichstrasse with the flags of the embassies established in 2008
Philip Johnson House: Corner between Friedrichstrasse and Schützenstrasse

The house has eight upper and three lower floors with a gross floor area of around 38,000 m². Risalit -like structures clad in natural stone form a tower-like ensemble , which is connected by intermediate glass structures. With the curtain walls tilted from the vertical above the entrances, “Johnson's rebellion against the expected” is articulated. The height of the eaves in Berlin is accentuated by a cornice band at a height of 22.90 meters. A white metal band with the names of the shops runs parallel to the cornice above the ground floor. On the ground floor, passages lead in a cross shape from all sides of the building into the central, three-storey atrium, which is glass-roofed at a height of twelve meters and is reminiscent of Heinrich Tessenow's Stadtbad in 1930. About ten centimeters behind the recessed windows are gray-olive coated aluminum sheets, which are supposed to block the view under the desks.

Above the building base, which houses public uses such as shops on an area of ​​3,000 m², there are seven upper floors with a further 18,000 m² of lettable area. The office uses in it are designed as two-tier structures and enclose two inner courtyards. The top floor is set back for urban planning reasons and thus offers a surrounding terrace in front of the offices. The top floor is not set back towards the inner courtyards. The risalites form dormers above the eaves height . Outside, in the atrium and in the entrance areas, the walls are clad with gray-purple flamed granite, which after cutting was treated with a 900 ° C flame.

The floors are accessed via seven staircases and three lifts with two cars each.

reception

Philip Johnson five years after the building was completed in 2002

The design of the building could not convince the critics in the Berlin architecture scene and did not fulfill the hopes placed in it, which were increased by the marketing department of the investors. Franz Schulze described the design as an “average work with a modern twist”, which “can hardly be considered a noble work”. “This work was all the more alien to the deconstructivist-oriented style influenced by Gehry, which had occupied [Johnson's] imagination lately.” Falk Jaeger wrote in 1999 “The building has nothing original, powerful, independent, as expected from Johnson became "and closes his report with the statement:" The house [is] a reflection of its American masters: professionally run, highly effective, technically innovative, but deadly boring and not very stylish in the outfit. "In another - more postmodern - reading it can Buildings can be viewed as the superimposition of a stone cage over a gridded glass cube.

After negative reviews, Johnson, who often criticized the work of other architects himself - a BBC documentary published in 1993 called him the "godfather" of American architecture and portrayed him as a "calculating and manipulating mastermind" - Berlin urban planning and the Responsible for building regulations of the Berlin Senate . He affirmed this in a speech in the Renaissance Theater on June 13, 1993. In it he criticized urban planning in general and that of Berlin in particular, which was characterized by the critical reconstruction influenced by Senate Building Director Hans Stimmann and him, like all other architects, in the design of the house in Friedrichstrasse. Johnson, on the other hand, advocated a different approach to urban planning, which, in his opinion, went back to ideas from Karl Friedrich Schinkel . At the end of the speech he presented a second design for the building in Friedrichstrasse: a cube formation in the style of deconstructivism reminiscent of intertwined icebergs. His Berlin partners did not share Johnson's criticism.

financing

At the beginning of the project, Lauder was the main investor, but after complications during construction and the calculation, he left in September 1997. The calculation was based on an occupancy rate and rental prices that were difficult to achieve on the Berlin property market - around 1.5 million square meters of office space were vacant. Accounting tricks led to a further deterioration in the situation ten years after the opening. The real estate fund established for the building after Lauder's exit went into bankruptcy in 2005 . This affected the deposits of 1,900 investors. In 2006 the American investment firm Tishman Speyer Properties bought the house.

Lauder's former partner Mark Palmer, who left the project in 1996, made the federal government jointly responsible for the bankruptcies with its sluggish government move in the 1990s.

literature

Web links

Commons : Philip Johnson House  - Collection of Pictures, Videos and Audio Files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Description of the Houseball on the artist's website, accessed September 11, 2009.
  2. ↑ friedrichstrasse.de: Bockwurst Hunger und Durst , accessed on November 22, 2009.
  3. ↑ a b c Tote pants . In: Der Spiegel . No.  27 , 1998, pp. 119 ( online ).
  4. ↑ Bauwelt. Issue 21/1993, p. 1110.
  5. ^ Franz Schulze: Philip Johnson. Life and work. 1996, p. 461 ff.
  6. ↑ Transcript of the speech “Berlin's Last Chance - Schinkel, Messel, Mies van der Rohe - Now what?” on June 13, 1993 in the Renaissance Theater in Berlin.
  7. ↑ Checkpoint Charlie: Who does the property really belong to? In: Berliner Morgenpost . 4th July 2005.
  8. ^ Official pages of the embassies of Ireland , Singapore and Australia
  9. ↑ Friedrichstrasse 200 sold. In: Immobilien Zeitung. July 21, 2011.
  10. ^ "Johnson's rebellion against the expected is embodies in bays of curtain wall that seem to pivot outward on the diagonal." In: Richard Payne, Hilary Lewis, Stephen Fox: The architecture of Philip Johnson. Bulfinch Press, Boston 2002, ISBN 0-8212-2788-2 .
  11. ^ A b Peter Blake: Philip Johnson. 1996, p. 236.
  12. ↑ a b c Rainer Haubrich , Stefan Loipfinger: Solitaire with corners and […] risky calculation. ( Memento of June 10, 2007 in the Internet Archive ) Retrieved September 8, 2009.
  13. ^ Franz Schulze: Philip Johnson. Life and work. 1996, p. 464.
  14. ↑ Falk Jaeger: An American in Berlin. In: Der Tagesspiegel . January 9, 1999.
  15. ↑ “… therefore its overlay of gray Brazilian granite on a glass curtain wall…” In: Richard Payne, Hilary Lewis, Stephen Fox: The architecture of Philip Johnson. Bulfinch Press, Boston 2002, ISBN 0-8212-2788-2 .
  16. ^ Franz Schulze: Philip Johnson. Life and work. 1996, p. 462: Original title of the documentary Philip Johnson: Godfather of American Architecture .
  17. ^ Franz Schulze: Philip Johnson. Life and work. 1996, p. 466 ff.
  18. ↑ Tina Manske: Refurbishment concept for Philip Johnson House failed: 1900 investors affected. In: Der Tagesspiegel. December 20, 2005.
  19. ^ Tishman Speyer buys the Philip Johnson House. In: Berliner Morgenpost . September 6, 2006.
This version was added to the list of articles worth reading on December 14, 2009 .