German Development Debacles Give Architecture a Bad Name

Architects Christoph Ingenhoven, Meinhard von Gerkan and Pierre de Meuron, designers of three of Germany's most disastrous developments speak about their troubled projects and the damage inflicted on the status of architecture in the country.

1 minute read

June 18, 2013, 12:00 PM PDT

By Jonathan Nettler @nettsj


"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."

Friday, June 14, 2013 in Spiegel Online

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I love the variety of courses, many practical, and all richly illustrated. They have inspired many ideas that I've applied in practice, and in my own teaching.

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