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His father was Hitler's star architect--but his buildings are deeply humanistic.
He can't get work in Berlin--yet his firm is one of the biggest in the world.
His name is notorious--and still you've never heard of him...
By Hugh Eakin
February 2002
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Annette Hauschild/OSTKREUZ
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In two floors of a former printing building in Frankfurt, well away
from the signature high-rises that make up the city's nerve center, an energetic
group of men and women are redesigning urban civilization. One is creating
infrastructure for an 8,000-unit housing development in Belize. Another
is working on a traffic master plan for all of Nigeria. Two are discussing
a bid for Shanghai's Expo 2010, and someone else is coordinating a tourism
concept for a giant swath of southern Croatia and Montenegro. On the walls,
and on every available flat surface, diagrams and renderings document
other projects ranging from a proposal for Europe's tallest skyscraper to
a new government district for Chongqing, an upper Yangtze River metropolis
now on its way to becoming the largest city in the world.
Contrary to expectations, Germany's most dynamic urban-design practice is
not located in Berlin. In fact, despite all of the recent activity in the
new German capital, the firm has done very little work there. It is
based in Frankfurt, and it's called AS&P, Albert Speer & Partner.
The man behind it is a charismatic mentor, an interdisciplinary taskmaster,
and one of the top city planners in Europe. As it happens, he is also the
son of another Albert Speer, likewise an architect and planner, whose work
for the Nazi regime has left a permanent scar in German memory.
Hitler's star architect was the designer of the immense Nazi party rallying
grounds in Nuremberg, author of the Reich Chancellery and the monumental
redesign of Berlin, and finally the brilliant mastermind, as armaments
minister, of the German war machine in World War II. The name Albert Speer
continues to evoke in the popular imagination the infamous organizational
talent who turned his profession--as no other before him or since--into
a weapon of totalitarian dictatorship. Six decades after the fact new biographies,
a theater work, and even a just-opened museum record an obsession with fascist
Berlin's master builder that is as alive as ever.
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VICTORIA TOWER (2001), MANNHEIM, GERMANY
The Victoria skyscraper was constructed in 20 months, faster than any other
high-rise in German history. The narrow building consists of a central concrete
structure enveloped in a glass skin, which allows for natural ventilation
and operable windows in every office.
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Top, Rainer Drexel/Frankfurt am Main; bottom, courtesy Albert Speer
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The younger Albert Speer presents a fascinating paradox. Beset with the
overpowering associations of his namesake father, he has chosen to devote
himself to a career in which those associations cannot help but come into
play. And he has managed not only to overcome this burden but also to reach
the uppermost echelons of his field. Although not well known in the
United States, AS&P now ranks among the top 100 architecture practices
worldwide. The firm has done projects all over Asia and the Middle
East, and it is not a stretch to say that it has given shape to much of
contemporary Frankfurt.
Unassuming but self-assured, Speer is the very picture of a man at ease
with himself, an accomplished rower whose svelte appearance shows a good
deal less than his 67 years. He expresses an almost exclamatory enthusiasm
for his work. And although he is a retired university professor, civic leader,
and published authority on sustainable development, he betrays none of the
reverence for status and title that is characteristic of the German power
elite. "We're not a hierarchy, with everyone standing like this when
I come in the room," Speer laughs, getting up as if to greet a head
of state.
This informality is manifest in the AS&P offices. Despite operating
a branch in Shanghai as well as Frankfurt, the firm has none of the
appearance of a big-money multinational. Casually dressed young people--many
former students of Speer's--give the Frankfurt office the feel of a
new-economy start-up. Responding to a flood of commissions, the firm
has expanded from about 70 to some 120 staff members in the past three years.
AS&P is also unusual in Germany for its open-ended emphasis on all aspects
of urban design: some 40 architects work with an equal number of city and
regional planners, plus about 15 transportation experts and a handful of
other specialists. "Albert Speer is a liberal left social planner,"
says longtime acquaintance Peter Eisenman, who collaborated with him on
a Frankfurt housing development in the early 1990s. "Probably one of
the most accomplished in the world."
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EUROPA VIERTEL (2010), FRANKFURT, GERMANY
Speer beat out star architect Helmut Jahn with his design for Europa
Viertel, a site created when German Railways reorganized its track
network at the center of Frankfurt. The AS&P plan includes a new
urban district and the Millennium Tower, which would be Europe's tallest
skyscraper.
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Top, Europaviertel Modellfoto; bottom, courtesy Albert Speer
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In many ways, Speer's work provides a precise counterpoint to his father's
legacy. His urban ideal, enshrined in his 1992 book Die Intelligente
Stadt (The Intelligent City), is the socially progressive humane
metropolis, and much of his activity has been abroad, in the developing
world. He is politically adaptive, having worked with both major German
parties and international clients ranging from Communist Chinese municipalities
to Arabian emirs. And he eschews loud architectural statements and the notion
of a distinct signature. "Style is very important," Speer says.
"But if you have to build an insurance building in Mannheim, it must
be a different style than an insurance building in Shanghai."
In practice this belief has given AS&P an almost chameleonlike ability
to adapt to local contexts. Its prize-winning recent design for a new House
of Representatives for the Yemeni government in Sanaa incorporates an Islamic-inspired
dome, whereas its proposed town hall for twenty-first-century megacity
Chongqing resembles a cross between a Miesian tower and a futuristic pagoda.
"Most architects are not educated in urban design," says Martin
Wentz, who was head of planning for the city of Frankfurt from 1990 to 2001.
"But Speer is an excellent city planner, and there is no typical design
in city planning. It must react to the local situation."
Speer's international work introduces local practices to up-to-date techniques.
He describes his work in China as "knowledge transfer" on sustainable
development. "We're trying to network planning, infrastructure, and
utilities--to save energy and resources, and preserve the environment,"
he says. "I'm convinced that in five years they will be able to
do it all without us--they are good learners. My task is to help them along
the way."
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TOWN HALL, CHONGQING, CHINA
Speer designed a town hall for a new government district that is under development
in Chongqing, a burgeoning metropolis on China's Yangtze River.
Albert Speer
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Although Speer's pragmatism does not lend itself to the popular acclaim
of a Frank Gehry or even a Robert Moses, it has given him an enviable reputation
for getting things done. In the early 1990s, when Eisenman's rippling design
for a Frankfurt housing settlement was too radical to be translated into
local planning law, Speer's team was able to create a three-dimensional
zoning master plan, unprecedented in Germany. More recently, when the team
of German-American architect Helmut Jahn and Deutsche Bank was out-muscling
the city of Frankfurt for a multibillion-dollar development in Frankfurt's
own downtown, the city gave Speer four weeks to come up with a better plan.
His effort beat out Jahn's, despite the latter's higher profile.
"Jahn came in with this extraordinary presentation. They must have
spent a million deutsche marks on the maquette alone," says Wentz,
who represented Frankfurt at the time. But, he adds, the Jahn plan called
for creating a series of big designer towers without really defining
the space between them. Speer, in contrast, used his planning expertise
to develop an integrated urban concept centered upon a tree-lined boulevard.
Rather than big buildings, he emphasized a controlled variety of medium-density
development, punctuated by a residential district and green spaces. According
to Wentz, "With Speer's design, we quickly reached Waffengleichheit
[parity of firepower] with Jahn."
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