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BEHNISCH AND PARTNERS: 50 YEARS OF ARCHITECTURE
By Dominique Gauzin-Müller. London: Academy Editions. 1998

This is a strange and disappointing book which suffers from a lack of any creative or imaginative overview, or indeed of any charm, and leaves the reader to do most of the hard work which proper architectural criticism requires. Inexplicably subtitled ‘50 Years of Architecture’, it starts with a project scarcely 40 years old and blunders through the ensuing decades with a combination of bland descriptions of buildings that are ‘interesting’, ‘inviting’ or ‘successful’, of photographs that invariably fail to do justice to their subject, and of various repetitive quotations from the maestro which fail to throw any light on anything valuable. There is not enough on the magical lacy structure built for the Munich Olympics, only a passing reference there to the collaboration with Frei Otto (did he and Behnisch fall out?), and nothing at all on the ways of working with the environmental artists who have had such an impact on so many of Behnisch’s buildings. There are not enough plans (the famous cascading staircase hall at the Catholic University of Eichstätt is incomprehensible in two-dimensional reproduction without one) and there is no attempt whatsoever at any theoretical analysis. As for Herr Behnisch himself, we hear early on that he ‘only rarely does any designing himself’; indeed, he ‘only uses a pencil in emergencies’. So what does he do?
The agitated stirrings of a nervous, even disruptive, architecture that came fluttering off the elevations of Eiermann’s Neckermann works in the late ’50s have now conquered the heart of the German establishment, as illustrated by Behnisch’s new plenary chamber for the Bundestag. However, even those who share the AR’s enthusiasm for this low-church, high-minded, finely-detailed northern architecture will find no clues in this book as to what it means. Is the edgy unmonumentality of post-war German architecture reacting to the overblown classicism of the 1930s, or, in fact, to the dull, dusty, lumpy Germany of the early Federal Republic?

TIMOTHY BRITTAIN-CATLIN