German Development Debacles Give Architecture a Bad Name

"Stuttgart's train station, Hamburg's concert house and Berlin's airport: Three projects in Germany are currently competing to be seen as the country's most disastrous," write the editors of Spiegel.

"Christoph Ingenhoven, Meinhard von Gerkan and Pierre de Meuron are among the best-known architects in the world. So how is it possible that these grand masters are responsible for construction sites where many things have been going wrong for years? What are the reasons that public building sites in Germany so often turn into scenes of disaster? As different as the three architects' projects are, their problems are similar: delays to the point of construction freezes and hundreds of millions of euros in cost overruns."