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HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES (2005), SANAA, YEMEN
This complex will feature not only a government chamber but also offices,
a press center, a mosque, a hospital, a printing workshop, a library, a
museum, and retail space. Inspired by traditional Islamic architecture,
the government chamber will be located centrally under a dome. Other facilities
will be located in an adjoining system of courtyards.
Albert Speer
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Like his father before him, Speer is a finely disciplined achiever,
capable of delivering on the most challenging projects with great efficiency.
The elder Speer was legendary for his night-and-day building operations
for the Nazi elite; AS&P's diamond-shaped Mannheim skyscraper set a
record last year for the fastest high-rise construction in German history.
And like his father, Speer has had the opportunity to work on projects of
national significance: Speer senior designed the German Pavilion at
the Paris World's Fair in 1937; Speer junior provided the elaborate master
plan for Hannover's multibillion-dollar Expo 2000, one of the largest and
most expensive development projects in postwar Germany.
But there the similarities end. Where his father was a power-obsessed architect,
intent on reordering society with built structures of a grandeur that had
not been seen since ancient Rome, the younger Speer thinks as a planner,
intent on solving the problems of others and integrating his work into the
existing fabric of cities. In place of the elder Speer's notorious theory
of "ruin value"--how imposing a building would look in 1,000 years--AS&P
gives priority to energy-efficient design and environmental sustainability.
(According to a recent exhibition at the German Architecture Museum in Frankfurt,
the firm's double-skinned Mannheim tower features one of the most ecologically
advanced cooling systems ever applied to a German high-rise.)
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EXPO 2010, SHANGHAI, CHINA
AS&P was selected to design the site for Shanghai's bid to host the
2010 Expo. The firm created a traffic-smart plan with a combined subway
exit and observation tower at its core.
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Albert Speer
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Still, for the decision-makers of the new Berlin, the historical nuances
remain. Even though Speer's competition successes can be documented everywhere
from Munich to the banks of the Yangtze, he has been largely shut out of
Europe's biggest center of building and planning over the last decade. "In
Berlin we've done relatively little, and we've also had no great luck in
competitions," Speer says with resignation. "My name still plays
a role. That's the way it is." According to AS&P senior partner
Friedbert Greif, "It's the only city where we have any problems."
He says competing firms use the name to prevent AS&P from getting
contracts. "They use it, not loudly--they talk about this under the
table--but they use it," Greif says. "We have no fun doing work
in Berlin."
Indeed, in almost every major debate about Berlin's capital rebuilding effort
of the 1990s the ghost of the elder Speer--and his plans for "Germania,"
Hitler's new Reich capital--loomed in the background. Because Speer's grand
axis was to run north-south, the new Spreebogen government district had
to go east-west; and the desire for a substantial new chancellery building
had to be weighed against the memory of the overblown quarter-mile-long
chancellery Speer designed for Hitler.
"To have the name Albert Speer in Berlin is a great limitation,"
says Paulhans Peters, former editor of the German magazine Baumeister,
who has known the younger Speer since the early 1960s and wrote a monograph
about AS&P in 1997. "And there are no two ways about it. He could
do whatever he liked, and it would immediately be thrown in with what his
father did after 1933. These wounds that the elder Speer inflicted
are still perceptible today."
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REBSTOCKPARK HOUSING DEVELOPMENT (1990), FRANKFURT, GERMANY
Speer created a three-dimensional zoning plan for an undulating Peter Eisenman
design that was too complicated for local planners to interpret.
Peter Eisenman
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By his own account, Speer never intended to become an architect and planner.
"Never in my wildest dreams did I imagine I would find myself
where I am today," he says. Born in 1934 in Berlin as the eldest of
six children, he spent most of his childhood at the mountain retreat south
of Munich where the families of Hitler's inner circle resided. Although
he was a regular guest at the Führer's own compound, along with other
children of the Nazi elite, he had very little contact with his father,
who worked in Berlin and returned for only short visits. After the war his
father was sentenced at Nuremberg and spent the next 20 years in prison.
For the young Albert the trauma of those early years had a lasting effect.
"I developed a stutter early on, and was taken out of school,"
he says. "For three years I apprenticed as a carpenter." It wasn't
until 1955, after overcoming his speech impediment and completing an equivalency
diploma in night school, that he entered university in Munich--where his
father had studied. "As it happened," he says, "I chose to
study architecture."
Calling it "coincidental" to his father's career, Speer attributes
his decision most of all to a desire to do something applied and artisanal.
"I am not a gifted draftsman," he says, "and I never thought
I would be an important architect." He does acknowledge a family affinity
for the profession, noting that his father's father was also an architect
and that his mother's side of the family came from a tradition of skilled
craftsmen. (Today, although Speer recognizes talent in some of his father's
work--"He did some very beautiful things, such as his house in Berlin"--he
holds no illusions about the big Nazi commissions. "The Great Dome
[intended for Berlin] is monstrous," he says. "It no longer has
anything to do with architecture.")
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HOLBEINSTEG FOOTBRIDGE (1990), FRANKFURT, GERMANY
AS&P's pedestrian suspension bridge over the Main River connects some
of Frankfurt's most prestigious museums.
Wolf Art Weisbaden, courtesy of Siemens
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In any case, Speer was immediately drawn away from architecture to the then
relatively specialized field of urban planning and, with it, to the
possibility of moving away from the shadows of the past. "I was 11
when the war ended," he says, "and I always wanted to be able
to get beyond Germany." As a student, he spent time in Turkey and Sweden.
And in 1964 while working in a large firm in Frankfurt, he took a six-week
Greyhound bus trip across the United States--"a ninety-nine-dollar
ticket!" he recalls--where he met legendary Philadelphia planner Edmund
Bacon and visited Skidmore, Owings & Merrill in Chicago.
But it was in the early years of Speer's work as an independent planner
that he laid the true groundwork for what became an astonishingly international
career. Already in the late 1960s Speer had landed a contract with the Libyan
government to develop a master plan for Western Tripolitania. "The
risk was enormous, as no one [on our team] had any experience abroad,"
he wrote in a 1997 essay, noting that an entire regional zoning plan had
to be produced in 24 hours. But, he added, "the project survived Gadhafi's
takeover and was completed successfully in three years."
In 1970 Speer formed a partnership with Diedrich Praeckel, an architect
who had studied with Louis Kahn and worked briefly in I. M. Pei's New
York office. By 1972 Speerplan--as his practice was called at the time--had
opened a branch office in a Le Corbusier building in Algiers. During
the rest of the decade, Speer received commissions in Nepal, Tunisia, the
United Arab Emirates, and Saudi Arabia, culminating in his much admired
Diplomatic Quarter development for Riyadh. "During the 1970s,"
he says, "some seventy to eighty percent of our work came from abroad."
(The city of Frankfurt first heard about Speer through a newspaper
article about his work for the Saudis.)
Although Berlin has remained largely unreceptive to his ideas, Speer's practice
has grown steadily since German reunification, having more than doubled
its annual income in the last five years to a record DM20 million (about
$9 million) in 2000. In China, his current passion, AS&P has become
an established name, landing close to a dozen projects since 1994. Foremost
has been the city of Shanghai's selection of the firm this past November
to design its ambitious bid to host Expo 2010. Speer eliminated the problem
of external traffic access for the anticipated millions of visitors
to the planned site by designing a subway exit/observation tower in the
center of the development. Another selling point of the plan, as in Hannover,
is its post-Expo conversion concept.
Speer also foresees growth in Eastern Europe with the expansion of the European
Union. And then there is Frankfurt. Since he started working in the city,
Speer has left his mark on everything from street planning to a riverside
museum district to office high-rises. He is particularly proud of the
Holbeinsteg, a suspension footbridge across the Main River that he completed
in 1990. "We've had the chance to really influence city development
during the past twenty-five years," Speer says. "There isn't
a big project in Frankfurt in which we have not played a role."
Wealthy, well-organized, and now host to the European Central Bank and its
new currency, the Euro, Speer's home base may arguably supersede Berlin
in importance in the coming decades. "Frankfurt will be the more international
city," Speer opines, noting that it is still nearly impossible to fly
to Berlin from abroad without stopping in Frankfurt first. "We
provided a regional development concept for [an international airport] in
Berlin six years ago," he says ruefully. "Nothing happened. I
believe that the Berliners are happy with their regional airport and don't
want anything better."
In the end, the contrast between Speer and his father may be precisely that
between Frankfurt and Berlin. Berlin is the sprawling but still provincial
German capital, driven by politics and national symbolism and obsessed with
the past; Frankfurt is the small but cosmopolitan European hub, powered
by international commerce and geared toward the present. Where Berlin still
has its Prussian (and a few Nazi) buildings, Frankfurt is the only skyscraper
city in Europe. For Speer himself, born in Berlin but owing his career to
everywhere else, there is no question: "Now I am a Frankfurt man."
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