ARCHITECTURAL CRITICISM AND BUILDING PERFORMANCE EVALUATION IN GERMANY
Introduction
The analysis of the built environment occurs at different levels of reasoning. On one hand, there are building standards, complex building legislation, and recently created certification systems for sustainable building, including related assessment methods like post-occupancy evaluations (POE). Taken together, these guarantee a very high level of building technology in Germany. On the other hand, and from the perspective of design, things look different. Banality, wrong buildings in the wrong places, urban misconception, neglected infrastructure and structures that were built after World War II, are just some of the issues that need to be addressed and thought through by an architectural criticism that is relevant for society. Here, architectural criticism has to be seen as a propaedeutic tool for architectural theory.
The growing constraints of the economy, however, threaten the freedom of the press, too, especially in the building sector. This problem is complicated by criticism in a context that is constantly changing. For example, due to the growing importance of participatory planning processes, architecture criticism increasingly targets the layperson in order to counter populist arguments, among other things.
Architectural criticism
Architectural criticism until 1975
In a narrow sense, the history of architectural criticism goes back to the eighteenth century, to the early days of the print media (Arnulf 2004; Fuhlrott 1975; see also Chapter 9 by Nussaume). Initially, amateurs and educated connoisseurs of architecture discussed the beautiful and appropriate, the charming and tasteful. Starting in France, the professional discourse focused on the tension between tradition and modernity, and it remains connected to cultural spheres which initially included the new profession “civil engineer” (Philipp 1996; Froschauer 2009; Schnell 2005). Later on, architectural criticism evolved methodologically in separate circles of experts and laypeople. This happened after the history of art and architecture was established methodologically as a discipline in a collective unit. Early architectural articles were published in bourgeois Germany by civil engineering authorities, for example the Journal für die Baukunst (Journal for the Art of Building, since 1829). Next were journals like the Deutsche Bauzeitung (German Building Journal, since 1865) or Der Baumeister (The Builder). Descriptions, knowledge, manifestos, criticism, and propaganda formed a spectrum where architectural criticism emerged and evolved into a discipline. In the twentieth century, architectural criticism came under the influence of the construction industry, which supported an advertising clientele as the economic base for architectural magazines and also the daily press.
The critical investigation of architecture happened in journals through a positive selection which was not representative of the actual construction process. Professional criticism was largely characterized by the demands of Ulrich Conrads. For decades he served as editor-in-chief of the weekly magazine Bauwelt (World of Building), and he expressed himself in rather strong terms (Conrads et al. 2003; Ciré and Ochs 1991; Kemp 2009; Dechau 1998). Throughout, it has also been imperative for all critics to acquire as much as possible of the available onsite knowledge about a building, and to put it into a larger context of everyday building activities. These were consumed by endless and stirring debates about functionalism within the construction industry. They remained largely excluded from criticism, i.e. excited exchanges about individual projects, which in this context can hardly be described as criticism.
In the second half of the twentieth century, as the implementation of the car-friendly city threatened old neighborhoods, criticism of architecture and urban planning in the daily press started to concern itself with existing buildings, culminating in the architectural heritage year in 1975 (Colquhoun 1985; Flagge 1997).
Architectural criticism in the twenty-first century
The speed with which communication shifted to the internet in the last decades has driven journals into architecture-critical insignificance and economic ruin – a development whose consequences cannot yet be foreseen (Baus 2012a). The real estate industry capitalizes on architecture and urban planning which is increasingly uncontrollable by the community, and is rarely guided by policy. Certification systems for sustainable building (see also Chapter 24 by Walsh and Moore) result in improving building quality to a certain extent, but are also awarded to buildings that are dysfunctional, inappropriate from the perspective of urban development, and extremely banal and ugly.
While architectural criticism could deal with paradigm shifts and problems of pluralistic architectural philosophies (Baus 2012b), it has conflicts with the logic of the construction industry: Even if architectural criticism clearly denounces the extensive destruction of cities by demolition and new construction, it is in no position to deal with the interests of the real estate industry as criticism becomes less important, not only with respect to content, but also in the media and in reality. It is not only the internet which has the potential of engaging end users in an efficient manner who want to and are capable of influencing the development of their built environment using participatory methods. Laypersons know that they have a fighting chance in the political context.
This development mirrors Rambow’s argument: “It is not enough to understand architecture only as an object of the ‘feuilleton’” (i.e. feature pages in the daily press) (Rambow and Moczek 2001), a point that he made in one of the very few articles about “building evaluation” that were published at all in the Deutsches Architektenblatt (German Architechts’ Journal). Instead of a specialized criticism within closed circles of experts long before a building is utilized, Rambow calls for an evaluation of the building that focuses on its functioning during occupancy. This kind of assessment respects – in many cases for the first time – laypeople’s experience with architecture and “explains the role of architecture for a humane environment” (Rambow and Moczek 2001). In general, this relation between man and his (built) environment is the science area of a relatively young discipline in Germany, called “Environmental Psychology” or, more specifically, “Architectural Psychology.” While this discipline was underdeveloped in the 1970s compared to the US (Preiser 1972), today, several institutes and organizations, both in the public and private sector, conduct externally funded research projects or perform building evaluation as part of their range of services: “In contrast to architectural criticism POEs are based on empirical data, implying more than the mere reflection of individual critics and they consider many more aspects than only aesthetics” (Schuemer 1998). Nowadays, building performance evaluation is a complex issue within the German construction industry that is becoming more and more significant.
Building performance evaluation
The performance concept in the building life-cycle
In Germany – as well as in other German language areas – the scope of work and the performance of a building is traditionally well described in the form of bid documents. Aside from the project-specific quantified codes, numerous trade-related national, European, and international codes (DIN – Deutsches Institut für Normung/German Institute for Standardization; CEN – Europäisches Komitee für Normung/European Committee for Standardization; ISO – International Organization for Standardization) and all kinds of building regulations (BauGB – Baugesetzbuch/Building Code; VOB – Vergabe- und Vertragsordnung für Bauleistungen/Procurement and Contract Procedures for Building Works; EnEV – Energieeinsparverordnung/Energy Saving Ordinance etc.) need to be met during the building delivery process. With the advent of “facility management” in Germany in the mid-1990s, the traditional linear process of building delivery was gradually supplanted by the building performance evaluation (BPE) model (Preiser and Schramm 1997). It presents a holistic understanding of planning, programming, design, construction, occupancy, and recycling, including related review loops (see Figure 1.3, Chapter 1). Therefore, the evaluation of building performance doesn’t any longer exclusively take place at the end of construction in the form of technical quality control or aesthetic architectural criticism. Nowadays, a building’s performance is increasingly reviewed throughout its entire life-cycle, phase by phase, taking both the quality of the object, and more and more the quality of the process into consideration as well.
Good examples of this kind of quality control are the certificates of energy performance and of sustainable building.
Energy efficiency as critical factor
A milestone in the shift from the linear building delivery process to a holistic understanding of the building life-cycle was the oil crisis in 1973. The issue that oil is a limited resource suddenly became obvious to the German population: Four “car-free Sundays” introduced by a Federal law resulted in empty streets and highways. People realized that energy savings and efficiency were the requirement of the moment for both mobility and building.