Art in architecture in Germany

Architecture and art have always belonged together. Since 1950, in the Federal Republic of Germany and somewhat later in the German Democratic Republic, this interplay has been controlled primarily by the state. Even today, the Federal Republic of Germany is the most important client for art in architecture in the country.

Multi-stage, open or invited competitions are announced or organized for art in architecture. International, independent juries award the contracts or prizes for usually many hundreds of submissions for a new building or conversion project. There have also been and still are direct commissions. In addition to the Federal Republic of Germany, other clients of Kunst am Bau include cities, local authorities, municipalities, institutions, foundations and private collectors. The important thing is that the art should complement the architecture and use of the building in terms of aesthetics and content. To this end, it must meet fire protection requirements and satisfy various static suitability criteria.

The Federal Republic of Germany in particular is a patron of art in architecture. As part of its commitment to building culture, it allocates a certain amount of money to works of art that are created in connection with new architecture. As a rule, this amount is around one percent of the construction costs or slightly higher. Unlike works of art in permanent or temporary exhibitions, art in architecture is permanently and firmly attached to the inside or outside of the building or is located in the open space on the property.

Like architecture, art in architecture is immobile, mostly due to its format, weight and anchoring. It cannot be quickly replaced or removed. Often, and in the best case, it is linked to the development of the building, was designed specifically for the site and cannot simply be repurposed. Overall, a great deal of effort is put into art in architecture – it stands in public and non-public urban spaces as a symbol of our country’s culture.

“In order to promote the visual arts, the Federal Government is requested to earmark an amount of at least one percent of the construction contract sum for works by visual artists for all federal construction contracts (new buildings and conversions), insofar as the character and scope of the individual construction project justify this,” it was stated at the 30th session of the German Bundestag in 1950 on basic regulations. The German Association of Cities had recommended this treatment and it is the foundation stone for over 70 years of art funding in our country today.

In 1952, the German Democratic Republic also decided to intensify and promote the relationship between fine art and architecture with the “directive on the artistic design of administrative buildings”. In the German Democratic Republic, up to 2% of the planned construction costs were even to be made available to artists for fees and the realization of their designs from the outset.

Art-in-architecture commissions are very attractive for the designers because a large proportion, around 30 percent of the realization sum of the one to two percent of the construction sum mentioned, is made up of the artist’s fee. As construction volumes increased from the 1960s onwards as a result of economic growth in the FRG, an art-in-architecture boom set in. More and more artists made this mostly large-format art their specialty. Artists were often involved in the planning of new architecture at an early stage and were happy to discuss their designs in public discourses in order to express their social responsibility towards society.

Art in architecture experienced a rapid upswing in the 1990s with the expansion of Berlin into the German capital. Numerous federal buildings were erected in Berlin’s cityscape, which were to receive their counterpart of representative art alongside new or newly cubed architecture. A complete register of works of art for federal buildings has been compiled since 2014. The total number of works created since 1950 is estimated at around 10,000.

The digital “Museum of 1000 Places” has published the majority of these works of art for federal buildings in Germany and on German properties abroad on its website. When federal buildings are sold to private users, the art in architecture is also lost to the public: further access to the work and its maintenance and preservation are no longer guaranteed.

With its connection to the building and the building site, art in architecture is subject to a particular field of tension: the building-related specifications make it difficult to engage freely with artistic expression. On the other hand, this is also a particular challenge. In the course of the current debate on architecture and building culture, there seems to be a renewed interest in art in architecture among artists and the public.

This raises the question of how such a development can be supported and how art in architecture can be more closely linked to the general art debate. Media coverage of art in architecture is rather sparse compared to reviews of exhibitions, fairs, biennials and other art events.

Art in architecture is currently dominated by artistic genres such as sculpture and painting in large formats and approaches that are already established in art. Just think of the works in the federal buildings in the Spreebogen: Eduardo Chillida in front of the Chancellery, Georg Baselitz, Joseph Beuys, Christian Boltanski, Andreas Gursky, Sigmar Polke and Gerhard Richter in the Reichstag building, to name but a few.

They all belong to the who’s who of art history in the 20th century. What is difficult to incorporate into architecture is historical and contemporary sensitive media art, be it videos or acoustic works. They could also disrupt the flow of work processes.

In the GDR, from the mid-1960s, commissions for building-related art were expanded to include so-called complex environmental design. It became characteristic of art in architecture in the GDR that the works were not only related to a work of art tectonically connected to the building. The artists developed design concepts for building complexes, squares, residential areas and the design of companies, the “working environment design”. This meant that the artists’ fields of work not only overlapped with those of architects, but also increasingly with those of landscape and form designers or manufacturing companies.

The Haus des Lehrers, the first high-rise building on Berlin’s Alexanderplatz designed by the Hermann Henselmann collective between 1961 and 1964, is a fine example of art in architecture in the GDR: the building is adorned with a circumferential frieze of 800,000 mosaic tiles on the third and fourth floors.

The design was created by Walter Womacka and shows depictions of social life in the GDR over a length of 127 meters under the title “Our Life”. The Haus des Lehrers has been a listed building since the 1990s and is an important contemporary witness to the social ideals of the German Democratic Republic.

Art and architecture also come together in the Kunstraum Kassel at the local university: Innauer Matt Architekte quotes the virtues of modernism, but translates them into the present – without constructive hierarchy.