Meinhard von Gerkan: Humanitarian from Riga

Man cannot write about Meinhard von Gerkan without repeating the story of how it came about that one of the best airports in the world could be built in Berlin by an architectural firm whose founders were considered much too young and inexperienced to to tackle such a project. Meinhard von Gerkan and his office partner Volkwin Marg founded their office gmp in 1965, when they were just thirty years old. They took part in the competition for Berlin’s Tegel Airport and won it; when the examination board arrived, they rounded up all their friends, put a friend in a closet with a typewriter, and successfully feigned a big enough office. The airport was built – and suddenly made von Gerkan internationally famous.

Tegel was a drive-in airport: All gates were arranged around a hexagon, and you could take a taxi directly to your gate. From the parking lot through the decentralized, direct check-in to the plane, it often only takes five minutes. There was never a faster way to get to your flight again. The airport demonstrated von Gerkan’s way of thinking: the greatest possible freedom was achieved through the application of a geometric ordering principle – here a triangular grid, on which all other elements of the airport, from the ceilings to the furniture, were based.

In the years that followed, gmp grew into one of the largest German offices with around 600 employees today – and from Gerkan himself as an essayist to a high-profile critic of an overly dogmatic modern age. Instead of throwing “signature architecture” over the cities, he cleverly integrated his buildings – such as Hamburg’s brick Hanseviertel – into the existing context. Further airports were built in Hamburg and Stuttgart, whose terminal halls with their apparently lifting roofs were also images of the joy of departure, just as one has the feeling of arriving not only in a Chinese port city, but in the future in von Gerkan’s western train station in Tianjin.

From the turn of the millennium, von Gerkan became increasingly involved in Asia and thus became one of the first globally active German architects. His planned city of Nanhui New City near Shanghai is remarkable: it unfolds in rings around a three-kilometer-diameter lake, whose beaches Gerkan described as “endless Copacabana”. With its many green spaces and short distances, the city, which has already grown to 800,000 inhabitants, is considered a model for the rapidly expanding conurbations of Asia; you can quickly get to all public institutions, schools and leisure places, the spirit of Tegel has become an entire city here. The “endless Copacabana” is also an image of the philanthropic character and the social claim of the architecture of Gerkans: As in Rio de Janeiro, the population should mix cheerfully on the beach regardless of all income differences and origins.

The first office of global Germany

Born in Riga in 1935, von Gerkan did not have a carefree childhood. His father died in the war, his mother died shortly after fleeing. The architect grew up as a foster child near Hamburg, first studied law and physics and finally architecture. The fact that his office can be considered one of the first truly global ones in Germany is not only due to the number of non-European projects, but also to the fine echoes of the most diverse cultures and styles that can be found in a number of the office’s buildings: echoes of tropical modernism in Berlin’s Tempodrom ; the Concentrated Asian Temple in the demountable Christ Pavilion at Expo 2000; the motif of cantilevered temple roofs in the Hanoi Museum’s spectacular inverted pyramid, whose wide cantilevers provide shade and thus reduce energy consumption. In his bird-watching tower on the Graswarder one finds echoes of the structuralism of the 1970s, broken down to a humane scale and designed as a wooden structure.

Even his private house on Hamburg’s Elbchaussee, which is reminiscent of the beach houses on the American east coast with large glass facades solemnly open to the ocean, gives the place something transatlantic, distant. For Berlin he designed the new main station and the airport BER, whose catastrophic building history is not to be blamed on the architect but on the concentrated incompetence of the local government.

Meinhard von Gerkan shaped German architecture and its appearance in the world like few others – not only as a designer, but also as a professor at the Technical University of Braunschweig. Anyone who was able to get to know him personally met a thoughtful and critical, but at the same time warm-hearted, worldly and humorous thinker who, despite a notoriously busy schedule, passionately dealt with architectural education and the questions of students. He even found time for children’s questions: when he wrote to a primary school student asking if he could recommend the profession of architect, he replied that eighty percent of the profession was annoying, but that the other twenty percent was definitely worth it to become an architect.

Von Gerkan died in Hamburg on Thursday at the age of 87.