Panorama: Architecture in Germany

After four years, the Berlinische Galerie, State Museum for Modern Art, Photography and Architecture, is again showing the work of an exponent of contemporary Berlin architecture: Jürgen Mayer H., border-crosser between architecture, design and the visual arts.

Magic mushrooms

For Jürgen Mayer H., the pictures on May 15, 2001 must have been all he could have wished for: only a few weeks after its dedication, hundreds of people gathered beneath his large architectural-sculptural structure. It was as if they wanted to give a demonstrative proof of the building’s functionality: they needed it, accepted it.

The Metropol Parasol, the multi-functional building in the Plaza de la Encarnacíon in Spanish Seville, is reminiscent of a group of mushrooms. It is one of the most spectacular multiform buildings of the architects’ office J. MAYER H., founded by Jürgen Mayer H. in Berlin in 1996. Sometimes called the “biggest wooden structure in the world” (it is also probably the largest structure in the world that is held together by glue), the Metropol Parasol was completed in April 2011. In addition to a platform reached by a large staircase, the multi-storey building includes a site of archaeological excavations, a market hall, a restaurant and a panoramic path with a view over the rooftops of the Old Town of Seville.

Against “critical reconstruction”

Thanks to buildings such as the Parasol, Jürgen Mayer H. (actually Jürgen Hermann Mayer), who was born in 1965 in Stuttgart and did his university studies there and in the United States, is now regarded as one of the best known architects in Germany of his generation. His office is increasingly recognized as a specifically Berlin-style think tank, which has set its face stubbornly and successfully against the guidelines of “critical reconstruction” and its resultant architecture of stone facades with raster elements, which were laid down for the German capital in the 1990s.

This was probably a sufficient reason for the Berlinische Galerie, State Museum for Modern Art, Photography and Architecture, to organize an exhibition of the award-winning architect, who has also distinguished himself as a designer and visual artist. In the exhibition RAPPORT – Experimentelle Raumstrukturen (RAPPORT – Experimental Spatial Structures), Mayer H. rolls out an extensive black and gray carpet, up to 8.5 meters in height, on the walls and floor of the museum’s entrance hall. Its color structure consists of that everyday but usually ignored repetitive data storage pattern familiar from the inside of envelopes and the outside of pay slips.

The work, described by museum director Thomas Köhler as “architectonic intervention”, as “architecture without anything having been built”, should strengthen a component of a museum that exhibits and collects architecture which is comparatively neglected not only in the Berlinische Galerie. As primarily a spatial-graphic work, supplemented by seat sculptures, some small three-dimensional sculptures and a really rather modestly produced DV documentation of works by Jürgen Mayer H., RAPPORT highlights the “graphic origin” of his architecture, the genesis of his designs from two to three dimensions.

Thinking from the perspective of art

In fact, the structures, like the data storage pattern, serve Mayer H. not only as a theme for visual design (in 1988 he won the competition of the Berlin tram system for his now well-known interior design of the trains with similarly patterned anti-graffiti covers, but also as a spur to test new materials and forms in architecture. The formal structure of the Mensa Moltke, the canteen for the University of Applied Sciences, Teacher Training College and Art Academy in Karlsruhe, built in 2006 and made largely of polyurethane covered wood, also generates mainly such patterns.

Yet it is not only structures that interest the architect, who, as he says, “thinks from the perspective of art”, but also the technical characteristics of surfaces. His office experiments with heat-sensitive color and thermal surfaces that, for instance, optically reflect stored body heat and so make possible the short-term color markings of corresponding body parts on just used furniture or bedding. By almost optically submerging the viewer in the vast pattern structure of the (rather hard) carpet, and yet provoking him to seek the subject of the data grid, RAPPORT visualizes the graphic moment of origin of the architectonic experiment that is most important to Jürgen Mayer H.: the dialogue between body and object.