STUTTGART, Germany — The clash between builders and preservationists is as old as architecture itself, but it reached a fever pitch in the recent gilded age. And it is especially fraught in Germany, where the construction boom that began with the country’s reunification sometimes seems like a convenient tool for smoothing over unpleasant historical truths.
Few current projects better illustrate this conflict than Stuttgart 21, a plan to build an enormous new railway station, along with 37 miles of underground track, in the heart of this old industrial city. The $7 billion development, which is expected to be approved by the end of the year, is part of an ever-expanding high-speed train network that planners hope will one day link the entire continent. As one of the largest developments in Europe, it could radically transform the city center.
But the design shows a callous disregard for architectural history. Its construction would require the partial destruction of one of the city’s most recognizable landmarks: the Hauptbahnhof, Paul Bonatz’s Stuttgart central rail terminal, a monument of early German Modernism built from 1914 to 1928.
And in a particularly perverse gesture of “facadism” — a favorite tactic of bureaucrats and developers in which a few architectural elements are preserved while the rest of a structure is bulldozed — it would leave the station’s main hall and tower standing like some architectural amputee.
Even more troubling, Stuttgart 21 joins a growing list of misguided projects that are reducing Germany’s 20th-century architectural history to a fairy tale version of the truth.
Bonatz’s most celebrated works, like a system of streamlined locks and bridges built along the Rhine in the late 1920s, have a spare elegance reminiscent of the best examples of W.P.A. architecture in America. And even some of his Nazi-era work, like the 1936 Basel Art Museum, has an undeniably human dimension. Its stone facade, with its low classical arches, remains one of the city’s beloved landmarks.
But Bonatz is not an easy architect to love. The struggle to keep his practice afloat at the height of the Nazi era led him into endless compromises — aesthetic and moral. His studies for a gargantuan round stadium and a Munich train station — mercifully never built — represented the kind of grotesquely overblown classicism that Hitler adored. At the same time, his criticism of the work of Paul Troost, one of Hitler’s favorite architects, irritated the Gestapo. He eventually fled to Turkey.
Bonatz, in other words, was the kind of morally ambiguous opportunist found throughout architectural history, someone who may have ignored uncomfortable political realities when it served his interests and who fine-tuned his aesthetic to suit the values of his clients. Yet he also produced works of undeniable beauty.
Completed several years before Hitler took power, the Stuttgart terminal may be Bonatz’s most masterly architectural balancing act. Its imposing front facade, marked by a shallow arcade and towering stone pillars, is as haunting as an early de Chirico painting. Framed by stone entry halls at either end, it has a severe, stripped-down Classicism that also suggests why Bonatz was able to continue building well into the Nazi era. The two monumental wings, which extend back to frame the tracks, only add to the terminal’s imposing scale.
Yet Bonatz carefully softened this effect by placing the clock tower at the station’s southeast corner. The position of the tower, which once housed private waiting rooms for the king, helps to break down the design’s symmetry and gives it a human dimension. Set slightly off center from the city’s historic axis, it also demonstrates a genuine sensitivity to context, locking the design into a larger urban composition without interrupting the flow of traffic.
Stylistically, the design embodies Bonatz’s quest to find a balance between Classicism and Modernism. The first of the two wings, built from 1914 to 1917, is the most traditional and conservative, with spiraling wood staircases inside and elaborate ironwork grates over the first-floor windows. The great entry hall, built at the same time, had a traditional wood beam ceiling.
By the mid-1920s, when Bonatz was designing the second entry hall, he was using brick vaults instead of timber. The final wing, designed a few years later, was the most streamlined, its windows forming staccato horizontal bands that suggest that the architect was moving toward a more Modern aesthetic.
The entire composition can be read as an effort to come to terms with some of the period’s deepest anxieties: the struggle to keep pace with jolting technological and social changes and the related fear of losing contact with the past.
The new station, designed by Ingenhoven Architects, lacks similar ambitions. To construct it, the German rail authority plans to destroy everything but the terminal’s main halls and tower. The platforms would be buried underground, with the tracks set parallel to the old entry hall. A vast plaza would sit on top of this lower level, its surface pierced by big, eye-shaped light wells. Four new entryways, with shell-shaped glass and concrete roofs, would lead down to the platforms from the plaza’s corners.
The plan’s defenders argue that it is critical to the city’s economic future. It will reaffirm Stuttgart’s place as a hinge between Western and Eastern Europe, as well as speed up travel south, to Athens. What’s more, demolishing the old tracks and burying the platforms underground will free acres of valuable real estate in the city center — something that could generate billions of Euros in revenue for the rail authority.
Finally, there is the belief that large-scale infrastructure projects are just what we need in tough times. We need jobs, don’t we? And aren’t the best parts of the old building being saved?
What’s scary about this approach is its familiarity. Engineers, stop watches in hand, calculate the most efficient time between two points. Politicians crunch numbers, estimating that the bigger the job, the bigger the rewards. Developers begin counting the profits to be made when large swaths of public land are turned over to private interests.
Meanwhile, those who care about cities and their history are placated with the facadist dodge. And architecture is reduced to a picture postcard — an empty, superficial veneer.
In the case of Stuttgart, the nuances that breathe life into the design — the sequence of spaces leading from the city to the tracks, the conflict between tradition and modernity, will be lost. The new entry halls, however elegantly conceived, are likely to make the old hall seem like an appendage, stripping it of the function that gave it meaning.
There were other possible options. A proposal by the architect Roland Ostertag that would have replaced the existing train shed with a barrel-shaped glass roof would have been far more elegant and economical. Moving part of the tracks underground could have been part of that scheme too. And the difference in travel time would probably have been minimal. Many opponents of the plan assert that the new design would shave just a few minutes of travel time between Stuttgart and Ulm, the next stop on the line. Replacing the tracks that run between the two cities would save much more time. When I spoke to the station’s architect, he did not dispute this claim.
But this option was never fully explored, lest it give ammunition to the project’s opponents.
The insistence on putting economics above culture has already led to the destruction of major historic monuments like the Palace of the Republic in Berlin, a landmark of the East German period. It may soon lead to the dismemberment of Tempelhof Airport, one of the few great architectural accomplishments of the early Nazi period. If it continues, it will lead to a cheapened, oversimplified view of history, one that suppresses the conflicts and contradictions that make cities vital.
