Die Bauakademie und der Berliner Ziegel
After years of public disputes regarding one of Berlin’s most beloved buildings, the Berliner Bauakademie, the federal building committee has finally announced the conditions for an architectural competition to rebuild the famous former school. According to the competition guidelines, all designs must reconstruct the original design in some form. There are some inherent problems with these guidelines. First of all, the new function of the school is meant to foster innovation in building culture because the original school did so in both its architecture and its function. Sustainable aspects are meant to be incorporated into the designs, but this is an excuse to include innovation in the competition criteria while stifling discourse about it.
To understand the stakes of the competition, some history must be shared. The Bauakademie was commissioned in 1832 by the Prussian King to train builders for the first time in Brandenburg and much of Europe in both the art and science of building. Multitalented architects went on to design grandiose buildings in Berlin that were part of the socalled 18th century enlightened period in Germany. The school building itself was designed by arguably one of German’s most visionary architects, Karl Friedrich Schinkel, and looked like nothing else before it. A square, functional yet decorative and built solely with bricks, the school stood next to the old city Schloss for more than 100 years.
Since its demolition in 1962, the public has seemingly fetishized the building as exemplified by websites with benign names like ‘Freunde der Schinkelschen Bauakademie’ which present renderings of the building’s brick facades, selective historical plans and captions. The websites praise the building’s architectural supremacy and proclaim Schinkel’s unparalleled genius, again and again. Since their appearance in the 1990’s, these websites serve as the only depiction of the building that is easily accessible to the public. Without critique, their texts, such as ‘as much Schinkel as Possible!’ declare an urgent need for reconstruction. This idea was later, in the mid 2010’s, developed into ‘...but also more than just the building!’, referring to the innovative quality the new institution should have without suggesting what this is or could be.
With the project’s high stakes, maybe one would be less engrossed in the figure of Schinkel and more focused on the innovative aspects of the original building if the excavations of the Bauakademie’s physical ruins had occurred earlier and were more in the public eye. Run by Berlin’s technical institutions, the excavations started when the Bauakademie’s successor, a GDR government building, was demolished in 1996, but the excavation activities did not pick up in pace until the 2010’s, and only recently revealed relevant architectural details. Next to the old bricks, the remains of special mortars and decoration panels, which once blended together as architectural features, were found on site. The shapes and technical qualities of these parts allowed for other joining materials to be left out during construction, contributing to the purity of the building’s brick exterior. Now published on TU Berlin websites, descriptions of these findings demonstrate the innovative process that created the Bauakademie’s unique facades. The process of experimenting with materials is, in fact, part of Berlin tradition emboldened by art- and science institutions in the city. In institutions such as the Weisensee Kunsthochschule and the BAM (Federal Institute for Materials Research), or even in collectives like Haus der Materialisierung, all kinds of practical experiments are carried out, with respective focusses on designing, on re-purposing, or on altering materials. Schinkel’s experiments with bricks, revealed by the excavations of the former Bauakademie site, were a pioneer in the ongoing tradition of material experimentation in Berlin. Reconstructing Schinkel architecture without experimentation will recall tradition, but will not be a part of the tradition itself!
There is another problem with reconstructing the Bauakademie, namely the lack of cultural relevance of the brick material for a reconstruction compared to the relevance of the original bricks. To understand that context, it is important to understand Berlin’s historic love of the humble brick.
In the 19th century, migrants came to Berlin to work in the manufacturing industry, which included many brick factories located next to the city’s natural clay deposits. Thanks to centuries of brick church-building, bricks were associated with churches and their parishes, which served as the first bastions of community, welfare, and education in the region. The famous era-expression, ‘Berlin ist aus dem Kahn gebaut!’, which depicts barges with stacks of bricks and their factory logos filling the inland waterway system, further exemplifies the sense of pride instilled in the brick as a building material at the time.
Erected with only the newest type of smooth, red factory bricks, this pride would no doubt have been felt during the completion of the Bauakademie. The timing of the completion in 1836 had yet another impact because the building reignited the brick aesthetic as an exterior façade material. What was happening at the time was that bricks were disappearing from sight. They began to be put inside loadbearing walls that were covered in modern plaster for tenement buildings in the growing city. Other key aspects that caused this trend were that the churches, with their brick décor, were less frequently built, bricks were produced increasingly by machines and considered less beautiful, and the city’s grandest buildings were clad with expensive stones like marble. The early-modern era of brick expressionism that followed the completion of the Bauakademie underlines the importance of the use of bricks in the Bauakademie to preserve a tradition and to reignite an interest in bricks.
The bricks used in a reconstruction of the Bauakademie in 2025 would not be part of a now defunct brick industry. The reconstruction would not foster a contemporary building culture like its predecessor did, through the new use of exterior bricks. Just imagine, replica pieces would be made in distant workshops where their properties are monitored to follow contemporary generic building requirements, a process that is anything but culturally significant!
I wonder if the problems of innovation and of cultural relevance posed by a reconstruction of the Bauakademie can be turned around and posed as questions. Is it possible to innovate while rebuilding the Bauakademie while respecting its historic importance, and can that process be culturally relevant? If there is a founded notion that a brick building would more likely pay homage to the original than other materials would, how could these questions be precisely addressed?
There are countless bricks lying around sites of demolition, storage, and dump yards in Berlin. There is also a current need to economize resources and to re-use or to re-purpose existing objects and existing materials in all areas of design and building. However, used bricks apparently pose problems for construction, as explained to me by a representative of the Federal Association of the German Brick Industry (BVZi) when I planned to use old bricks for a new building. After lying around for X amount of years, remeasuring the technical properties in combination with the efforts of circumventing risk, causes the bricks to be too expensive to be used as loadbearing building parts.
Still, Schinkel’s holistic implementation of the industrial brick had been completely unimaginable. Their appearance as décor were a conundrum. Reflecting the success of his experimentations, maybe a contemporary conundrum of construction can guide the rebuilding process of the Bauakademie, and render it culturally relevant.
Solving the cultural conundrum of the Bauakademie is going to need material experimentation, for which Berlin has a longstanding tradition. Experimentation with re-used bricks in construction for the building of the Bauakademie is needed as a starting point. Truly recalling the value of Schinkel’s monument is to innovate, once more, with brick
LAURA MAASRY TEXT + BILD