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This scale model (above), seen from the northwest, demonstrates that
what happens inside the factory is visible from outside.
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From any angle the glass tower (above) is the factory's most
distinguishing feature.
Courtesy Volkswagen.
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The overhead rail track (above), another new technology, uses
horseshoe clamps to lift and optimally position vehicles at each
assembly station.
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To avoid creating traffic problems in central Dresden, Volkswagen
devised three specially outfitted trams (above) to bring in parts from a
suburban warehouse using existing tracks.
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Work in the production hall (above) takes place on two floors that
have glass observation bridges in the center (see elevation, below).
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Bottom, courtesy Henn Architects & Engineers. Others, courtesy Volkswagen.
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Scattered amid the greenery outside the factory, unnoticed by most visitors,
lie broken stones blackened by the city's bombing during World War II. The
Allied bombing in February 1945 left 85 percent of the city destroyed. Estimates
of the number killed range from 25,000 to 500,000. The East German government
favored the higher figures, to nurture Dresdeners' resentment against
the United States and the United Kingdom. "But nobody," says historian
Gunter Kirsch, a former East German cultural official, "counted
those who ran into the freezing cold Elbe River with phosphorus burning
on their arms." Dresden was an open city, he added, without targets
of military significance--and the Soviet army was 60 miles away.
The bombing, which destroyed historic buildings and left ruins for five
decades, remains the dominant fact about Dresden and its future. It is key
to understanding the factory, which for Henn is a gesture in urbanism and
an effort to help rebuild his hometown, whose economy has recently begun
to lag. Earlier this year metal and construction workers went on strike,
seeking wage hikes to combat inflation brought on by adoption of the
Euro. "Unemployment in Saxony runs between 15 and 20 percent,"
Ludwig says. "About 14,000 people applied for the 200 jobs in the factory."
The city, he adds, is still absorbing the effects of reunification.
"It's not just that people have lost their jobs, but they've lost the
feeling of their own value."
This summer Dresden was hit with some of the worst flooding in over
150 years. Rising water threatened to damage the city's extensive restoration
campaign. Curators at the Zwinger museum quickly moved paintings to the
attic; sets stored in the basement of the Semper opera house were destroyed;
and the Glass Factory was forced to close for a week. In October, as its
theater was being repaired, the opera staged performances of Carmen
at the Glass Factory.
Most tourists visit traditional attractions, but younger tourists from the
West are also drawn to the ruins of the GDR. They visit the 1969 Palace
of Culture, whose murals of heroic worker artists are covered with green
mesh curtains. They find the East German pedestrian shopping areas
quaint and preferable to the prisonlike Ufa Cinema by Rem Koolhaas, whose
concrete staircases surrounded by galvanized metal look menacing. They stop
in front of the Richard Schinkelp;designed watch house in the central
square, where a service offers rides in a real Trabant--the legendarily
pathetic East German people's car made of compressed wood pulp. "Ostalgia,"
or "nostalgia for the east," lingers.
"The factory is a way to advertise our city to the world," Weissgerber
says. "Before we had only the baroque buildings that were famous. Now
we have another building to make Dresden famous." The city has been
criticized for looking only to its past. Some claim its restoration of historic
structures that lay damaged for more than half a century has diverted energy
from new buildings and styles. While many buildings have been leveled, critics
say, preserving only the eighteenth-century ones has made the center of
Dresden a theme park. If it ain't baroque, the joke goes, don't fix
it. But the city could hardly leave unreconstructed the magnificent
Frauenkirche, the third-largest dome in Europe and the symbol of the city.
And Dresden has always looked back: one of its most famous landmarks is
the Meissen china mural that depicts generations of the royal Wetting dynasty
marching right to left--into the past.
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Though not all of the production process is on display--or even done
on-site-- what Glass Factory visitors see is also visible from outside
the building (above).
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Twenty-nine "fish-scale" conveyor units (above left) move chassis
and parts around an oval track. The airy rooms (above and below) have
glass-and-steel walls and maple-and-oak floors.
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In the last stage of production, cars go through the quality-control
station (above)--a neon-lit tunnel where workers can scrutinize the
paint for blemishes.
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Top & bottom, courtesy Henn Architects & Engineers. Others, courtesy Volkswagen.
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One day I borrowed a Phaeton and, following the tram tracks from the center
of town, drove out to the autobahn and was soon in open country, where an
overarching sky rose above green hills dotted with red poppies. The Phaeton's
design, by a team led by Harphmut Warkuz, is quite conservative. Few Germans
have seen one on the road yet. The car elicited frequent challenges from
autobahn cowboys in Porsches and Mercedes--the sort of drivers who like
to remove the engine specs from their trunks or roar up behind cars and
flash their blinkers. The Phaeton cruised rock-solid steady at 120
mph and calmly handled sudden braking for traffic.
Along the way I passed billboards for the new car, which have the slogan
"Ist das nur ein Auto?" ("Is this just a car?").
One might better ask, Is the factory that makes the car just a factory?
For Henn, the Glass Factory and the other buildings he has done for VW aim
to be more. "It's necessary that such places exist in order to inculcate
social values," he says. In the post-ideological age, the architect
argues, church and state have withdrawn from the public realm, leaving business
to stand for certain values--not just company values but wider social ones,
such as craft, safety, and concern for the environment.
It's a disconcerting sentiment, suggesting an ambition that borders on hubris.
VW's aspiration for the factory and car recall the ambition of the mythological
Phaeton, the son of Apollo, who one day asked his father to let him drive
the chariot that carried the sun across the sky--in effect to borrow the
family car. But he drove badly and flew so close to the Earth that
he threatened to burn it; Zeus struck him dead with a thunderbolt. Rubens
painted that moment as a tumbling chaos of drapery and flesh and gilt:
the downfall of hubris. This vision is not the most propitious association
for a project that hopes to soar so high.
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