BRICK, GLASS AND ACUTE ANGLES
Dilemmas of German architects.


Fritz Höger
Chilehaus.
Hamburg, 1923

Mies van der Rohe.
Building on the Friedrichstrasse.
Berlin, 1921

Hans Kollhoff.
Daimler-Chrysler Tower on Postdamer Platz.
Berlin, 1999

The proposal made by the German Expressionists to elevate the glass to the category of sublime material, capable of expressing a new spirituality, had a milestone in 1914: the glass pavilion designed by Bruno Taut for the exhibition of the Deutsche Werkbund, with its dome shaped like a carved diamond. By that time, Paul Scheerbart, author of the prose poem Glasarchitektur, wrote: "Building with brick only hurts us. The colored glass destroys hatred ... We are sorry for the culture of brick. Without a crystal palace, life becomes a burden." [1]
We can find a decidedly more modern version of Taut's glass palace in the proposal submitted by Mies van der Rohe to the competition held in 1921 to design an office building in Friedrichstrasse, Berlin, which exemplifies some of the principles that he would establish a year later in Beton, Eisen und Glas (Concrete, Steel and Glass), a text published in the first issue of the G group magazine: The pillars and the beams, when removing the loading walls, result in a construction made of skin and bones, a skeleton wrapped in glass.
The brick culture pointed out by Scheerbart has an important representative in the Chilehaus of Fritz Höger, an office building for a shipping company built in Hamburg between 1923 and 1924, subsequent therefore to the project for the Friedrichstrasse by Mies. The Chilehaus is a massive volume of dark brick, with pilastered facades, uniform fenestration and abundant decoration, like many other buildings from the same period in that German city.

Fritz Höger. Chilehaus. Hamburg, 1923

What makes Fritz Höger´s building unique is its silhouette seen from the intersection between the streets Burchardstrasse and Pumpen. That silhouette seeks to emulate the image of a ship: The stepped cantilevers of the last floors resemble the decks, and the corner is like a sharp prow.
These elements get reinforced by the curved south façade, essential to evoke the image of a ship's hull. Moreover, the wavy, concave-convex line of that façade contrasts heavily with the straight alignment of the north façade, and the resulting asymmetry makes the corner much more interesting (and modern).
The reason why buildings where two adjacent facades form an acute angle have such power as urban landmarks is the fact that the acute angle causes an elevation of the building, as if it puts on tiptoe to be higher. The reason of it is that the acute angle produces a distortion of perspective, which makes us perceive a silhouette cutting against the sky that corresponds to a much higher building.
The angled arrangement of the glass walls in the proposal for Friedrichstrasse seeks, according to Mies, to fragment the façade, avoiding too large glass surfaces and producing at the same time a reflections´ game. This game replaces in the glass architecture the game of light and shadow associated to load-bearing walls architecture, which is the one that we can find at the Chilehaus.
There is something scenographic in this type of plan shaped as an acute triangle, which of course can not be justified by functional issues, since it generates practical difficulties in the internal distribution. It is a plan for buildings that seek protagonism, apt to express its character of unique objects: There are not many singular corners in the city.
Both the Chilehaus and Mies´ building for the Friedrchstrasse can be considered as clear examples of expressionist architecture, and both have a sharp angled corner (Mies, in fact, has three). However, Mies´ building has been assimilated to the modernist avant-garde, and the Chilehaus has not.
The Chilehaus is not at all a classicist building, but rather Gothic, and its facades present a relief that makes them very different from the smooth glass surfaces of Mies´ building. Furthermore, those facades are made of dark brown brick.

Mies van der Rohe. Friedrichstarsse Competition entry, Berlín, 1921, photomontage

The exposed brick fabric has for Höger connotations of honesty and authenticity: Brick is considered an appropriate material to express the tempered German character, and so it must not be disguised with a mortar and white painting makeup, like it happened in the International Style architecture
Mies used also a brick fabric in his German houses of the 20s (Wolf, Lange, Esters...) for reasons of alleged constructive sincerity: At that time he claimed in the G group magazine: "We know no form problems, only building problems" [2]. But this stage was closed when the free plan, derived from the teachings of Wright and De Stijl, burst into his work and the brick gave way to glass and steel as almost exclusive building materials.
The tension that German architects experience regarding these two materials, glass and brick, can be related to what they want to express in their buildings: Own essences and constructive tradition or cosmopolitanism and cutting-edge technology. We could consider that brick is associated to the local, and glass to the international.
It is remarkable that when a certain idea of German pride reappears, as it happened after the reunification, brick reappears. Hans Kollhoff's Postdamer Platz tower is a good example, and it has many points in common with the Chilehaus: It is made of brick, its façade has a certain relief and, in addition, it also has an asymmetric corner at an acute angle. Its staggered volumes, although related to the American skyscraper tradition, are also a characteristic resource of German Expressionist architecture.
Next to Kollhoff´s tower there are some other office buildings that are a good example of today´s international style, that is to say the ostentatious glass and stainless steel high-tech corporate architecture usual in opulent countries.
We have got finally glass palaces like the ones that Scheerbart dreamed of, but they are the headquarters of powerful international corporations, so they will hardly contribute to let life not being a burden. It would therefore be preferable that these palaces do not impose their presence in such an obvious way, but they at least hide their power behind the windows of sober and severe brick façades.
Hans Kollhoff. Daimler-Chrysler Tower. Postdamer Platz, Berlín, 1999

NOTES:
1. Paul Scheerbart, Berlín, 1914 (cited by Kenneth Frampton in Modernidad y tradición en las obras de Mies van der Rohe, en VV.AA., Mies van der Rohe: su arquitectura y sus discípulos, MOPU, Madrid, 1987).
2. Mies van der Rohe, “Bürohaus”, G, 1, 1923 (cited in Johnson, Philip, Mies van der Rohe, Secker & Warburg, London, 1947).