Good hosts: we consider the effects of Germany's willingness to be a receptive host for the ambitions of foreign architects.

One of the most formative experiences of my architectural education was an early '80s field trip to the newly completed Staatsgalerie in Stuttgart. As callow students we were astonished by the scale and assurance of it all, beguiled by the ironic take on Classicism, the integration of museum and city, the punky blasts of colour. Our end of year projects were peppered with striated stone drums, fat pink balustrades and serpentine glazing, the follies of impressionable youth imitating without really understanding.

But what made an equally profound impression was the sense of esteem in which Stirling was evidently held, not only by his client and the local politicians, whose vision and support enabled him to realise such a major project, but also by the public, who voted with their feet and transformed what was essentially a provincial museum into a hugely popular national cultural attraction. In Germany anything seemed possible, but back in Britain, Big Jim was regarded as a difficult figure making difficult buildings that seemed to wilfully court both critical opprobrium and practical problems. (Our earlier field trips had also taken us to the Cambridge History Faculty Library and the leaking, languishing Florey Building in Oxford). Stuttgart effectively made Stirling and provided the onus for a series of large-scale German projects that consolidated his reputation.

Over twenty years later, I can imagine another equally callow generation of students being toured, equally awestruck, around Zaha Hadid's Phaeno Science Centre in Wolfsburg (p42). Doubtless they will go on to imitate Hadid's concrete contortions while maybe also pondering the paradox of how it is that she can build so confidently and inventively outwith the UK. Hadid is another 'difficult' prophet without honour in Britain who owes much of her career to German patronage. Vitra kickstarted it with the request to design a Fire Station for its Weil am Rhein campus (AR June 1993). Gradually she has moved into cruise control, with projects such as Landform One (also in Weil), the administration centre for BMW in Leipzig (AR June 2005) and now the publicly popular and critically acclaimed Phaeno, which may turn out to be her Staatsgalerie.

Hadid and Stirling are by no means the only 'britischer Architekten' to thrive in Germany. Norman Foster famously remodelled the Reichstag (AR July 1999), though politicians drew the line at his attempts to streamline the 'big fat hen' of the German eagle. Will Alsop began his career on a Hamburg quayside, Ian Ritchie reinterpreted Crystal Palace for the Leipziger Messchalle (AR December 1993) and Nicholas Grimshaw made an armadillo-shaped mark on Berlin with his Ludwig Erhard Haus (AR January 1999). David Chipperfield's architecture of sobriety and reticence has also found fertile ground with a new Literature Museum in Marbach and his ongoing remodelling of Berlin's Museum Island.

Germany--host nation

In the year in which Germany hosts the World Cup and an impressive roster of foreign architects are eagerly pursuing commissions there, it seems appropriate to consider Germany's reputation as a host nation for architecture. Thus the projects shown in this issue are not necessarily typical of German architecture, yet certain German conditions--imaginative patronage, civic ambition, technical inventiveness, the status and role of the architect--have helped to make them possible. Why does Germany still seem a receptive milieu for challenging architectural ideas from abroad and what are the wider implications of such apparent enlightenment?

Since reunification, Germany has assiduously courted foreign superstars to drive forward high profile projects, notably in the recasting and rebuilding of Berlin, but also in other urban centres, from Hamburg in the north to Munich in the south, and eastwards in the depressed zones of the former GDR. Ritchie's Leipziger Messehalle and Hadid's BMW building, for instance, are quavering beacons in a post industrial wasteland whose populace is still defecting to the west. In this issue, Herzog & de Meuron's library for the Technical University of Cottbus (p64) near the Polish border attempts to inject some civic bravado into a chronically despondent urban condition.

Meinhard von Gerkan of Hamburg-based practice von Gerkan Marg has clear views on why outsiders are so highly favoured. 'I suspect that Germany's great willingness to import foreign architects is due to a cultural and political inferiority complex. This may be the result of its history, or a subliminal compensation for the very pronounced German self confidence in public affairs.' (1) Big imported stars have the resources to gear up for the costly circus of international competitions and the chutzpah required to provide glossy signature buildings (the German car industry, for instance, is falling over itself to commission marketable foreign talent, AR June 2005). Some, though, are still capable of giving their pattern books a local twist. Frank Gehry's MARTa Museum in Herford (p56) is a surprising essay in local brick while Renzo Piano's department store in Cologne (p60) manifests wider urban ambitions. The omnipresence of brilliant outsiders, however, can be a double-edged sword, contriving to marginalise native talent. It must be hoped that the younger generation of German architects will still be able to find a voice despite their country's recent history of political convulsion and economic stagnation.

David Chipperfield has some interesting theories on the success of the foreign legion, believing that many German architects lack a degree of flexibility especially when dealing with client committees and that a willingness to compromise is seen both by the German profession and its architectural critics as a measure of weakness. In an essay on Chipperfield's German museum projects, Kurt Forster notes that '... (German) architects have inscribed stubbornness on their banners in order to defend and realise their artistic aspirations'. (2) But Chipperfield also acknowledges that the status of the architect in Germany still counts for something. 'In Germany there is a demand that the architect performs. You are asked to be an architect. In Britain you have to smuggle it in through the back door. You are essentially seen as a professional consultant who will bring some design to the project. In Germany you are seen as the cultural captain, you are making these decisions and you can respond to that'. (3)

Crucially, this notion of the supreme generalist is backed up by a sophisticated engineering culture and a responsive building industry. 'The German construction industry is the most confident in the world', remarked Wolfsburg project architect Christos Passas at a recent Architectural Association lecture. Even so, the complexity of the Phaeno Science Centre structure taxed the technical capabilities of its builders. Paul Scott, project engineer of Adams Kara Taylor, observes that 'In Germany there are quite traditional ways of producing drawings. We had to step out of that for this project. Drawing traditions were questioned a lot, as were materials and the way things were built.' (4) Yet somehow this untried and untested synergy of architecture and engineering, computer whizzery and craft skills came together and its reservoir of accumulated knowledge will gradually feed back into and enrich the continuum of architectural evolution. Only, perhaps, in Germany.

(1) New Britische Architektur in Deutschland/New British Architecture in Germany, Michael Jenner, Munich, Prestel, 2000, p25.

(2) DAM Jahrbuch 2005, edited by Ingeborg Flagge et al. Munich, Prestel, 2005, p22.

(3) Jenner, ibid, p25.

(4) Concrete Quarterly, Summer 2004.