How Architects Design Buildings Reprinted WZB Study Enlivens The

All Things Considered How Architects Design Buildings Reprinted WZB Study Enlivens the Debate on High-rise Development Kerstin Schneider “Shall we build a tower?” That sounds like building blocks and having fun. De- spite all the theory and precise observation, it is just as much a pleasure to read Jörg Potthast’s eponymous WZB discussion paper, first published in 1998 and now reprinted as a facsimile. There are – names changed – Tom, eloquent for- mulator Claus, Alfred, and of course Professor X, the head of the firm. In the late 1990s, the team designed a tower block for Berlin-Charlottenburg without being commissioned and with little prospect of seeing the project realized. Sociolo- gist-to-be Jörg Potthast observed them for weeks; to begin with no-one was quite sure who had sent him, but he soon won their trust and earned “weak participant status.” It is a godsend that Jörg Potthast’s field study (and diploma thesis) is available again 20 years after it was first published – thanks to Christian Berkes from botopress, plattform für architekturen, städte, technologien & fiktionen. He took up Design processes can take time: in 2017 the tower block “Upper West” (left in the picture) on Breitscheidplatz in Berlin was opened, 20 years after the first plans were drawn. [Photo: picture alliance] 78 WZB Report 2018 a suggestion of Bernward Joerges, formerly director of the then Research Group Metropolitan City Studies at the WZB. As the director wrote in his introductory essay to the high-rise volume, the group was concerned with “the period of the material redesign of the new Berlin.” Potthast’s reissued study on the “architectural firm as laboratory of the city” enlivens the resurgent debate on high-rise development in Berlin. The book invites us to think about the time dimension of the design process. The Berlin tower block whose design was the subject of the study was finally completed in the summer of 2017, even though it looks quite different. The plans of 20 years ago, which envisaged three tower buildings with a paradisiacal garden have giv- en birth to the “Upper West,” a 119 metre-high building, which together with the neighboring Waldorf-Astoria tower has since the beginning of this year formed Kerstin Schneider is press officer at the WZB. a completely new gateway into Breitscheidplatz – and thus to Berlin’s “City West.” [Photo: David Ausserhofer] [email protected] And residential towers are currently under debate to remedy the housing short- age on the overheated Berlin property market. Some discussions, for instance about high-rise development on Alexanderplatz have been going on for years. Others, like those on new plans for Ernst-Reuter-Platz have only just begun. Now the Berlin Senate is working on a framework plan for high-rise development intended to ensure that tall buildings make an effective contribution to the urban fabric. On the art market, too, tower designs are much sought after: photos of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s 1921 design for a high-rise building on Fried- richstraße – never to be built – recently fetched top prices at a Berlin auction. The book gives space not only to Bernward Joerges and Jörg Potthast himself, now professor of sociology in Siegen, but also to the sociologist Michael Gug- genheim from Goldsmiths, University of London. The empirical field research of the period is thus joined by other perspectives, which make just as fascinating and amusing reading as the original study. “What do architects do when they design?” is the simple question that Jörg Pot- thast asks at the beginning of his study. What constraints are there? How are ideas documented? How is the work carried out in concrete terms? How do the proportions of a building come into being? How politicized is the field? Over and beyond technical or urban policy debates, his work casts an ethnographic eye on the practices of architectural design with the architect as the object of scrutiny. In 1998, the young sociologist was thus one of the first to study “the architect’s office as an analogon for the laboratory.” The laboratory under study becomes a pars pro toto: “Innumerable architectural firms work incessantly, not infre- quently round the clock, on alternatives to the existing building stock of towns and cities. Only a negligible number of projects are ever realized. From this point of view, architectural firms are repositories for variously condensed, un- realized projects,” according to Jörg Potthast. Coincidentally, in the end, the building was constructed by the architect Potthast had been studying. Christoph Langhof or “Prof. X,” as he is referred to in the study, was the only Berlin architect who at the time let the ethnographer into his “laboratory” as observer. Years afterwards, by a circuitous route, Langhof and his team landed the contract to build the Breitscheidplatz tower. The then stu- dent and the architect now found themselves discussing the architectural study over a relaxed dinner, chatting about the business of high-rise development in Berlin, which “moves in waves in a what has always been an inhospitable milieu for tower buildings.” Reference Potthast, Jörg (ed.): Sollen wir mal ein Hochhaus bauen? Faksimileausgabe. Berlin: botopress 2017. WZB Report 2018 79.

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