Germany's Industrial Archaeology

In the ten years I've been casing Germany (going on four as a permanent resident of Weimar) I have never been so impressed culturally as by the efflorescence of its industrial archaeology, It's mainly so far in the old Ruhr industrial districts, but is gradually spreading all over the nation. My first epiphany was in Oberhausen in 1995 where the insides of an abandoned gasometer had been deployed to explicate the industrial history of Germany in an exhibition entitled "Das Feuer and Die Flamme".

I was literally speechless.It is a heady experience to climb to the top of that structure and gawk on the greening of the Ruhr Gebiet. I knew that World War I was partly due to Britain and France's edginess about Germany's catching up with (and threatening to surpass) them in its delayed industrialization. But its particulars were a continent away from my graduate education in American Literature. Some years later I returned there for a Christo show, which included a detailed tour of other abandoned industrial structures (factories, power plants, all the "ugly" effluvia of superceded technologies.) I almost decided, partly from fatigue I guess at having to metabolize so much at one fell swipe, that they were overdoing it!

Then I serendipitously dropped off at its inauguration as a museum (I was on my way to savor the ducal gardens in Woerlitz, having just imbibed a seminar in Dessau on Ernst Neufert, the visionary who industrialized architecture) of an old brown coal power plant at Vockerode. The architecture was stunning in its industrial simplicity, a side of German architecture that had been totally eclipsed by the likes of Walter Gropius and Mies van der Rohe. Strangely, a similar oblivion has submerged the reputation of the greatest architect to come from my home town of Detroit. Albert Kahn (1869-1942), emigrated from Rhaunen near Frankfurt with his rabbi father in 1880. The eldest of seven sons, he didn't even finish high school in Detroit, but apprenticed to an architect who was so wowed by his draughtmanship that he got him a traveling fellowship to Europe to prep himself, without formal education, for his great career as the architect for Ford's mass production.

He knew about the Bauhaus and openly scorned it--as "razored" architecture. Which didn't endear him to the Germanist Phillip Johnson who became the de facto legitimizer of architectural reputations until this very day. In 1940 the immigrants Gropius and Mies met with Kahn at the University of Michigan. They wanted war work, and Kahn had become the de facto Albert Speer of the American defense industry. He repaid their scorn by judging that they knew how to make museums and skyscrapers, but not factories. All the more odd because the great grain silos at American seaports had been the first stimulus for German modernists to streamline their architecture. It's the insides of factories Kahn believed they didn't understand. They were to him facile façade makers.

Now, there is at Essen an exhibition of equal importance on the architects Fritz Schupp (1896-1974) and Martin Kremmer (1895-1945) called "Symmetrie und Symbol" (until 3 November) at their "masterpiece", the Zeche Zollverein XII (1927-1932). Their use of grandly geometric steel girders to support mining equipment is as breathtaking as, say, Wren's St. Paul. And their constructivist use of brick would make even Mario Botta envious, it is so finely detailed. A catalog of specialist essays explores their ouevre in great and clarifying particulars. It offers an unparalleled opportunity to latch on to this German innovation.

(Unrelated, but pertinent is an exhibition in Amsterdam-until December 1 at the Stedelyk Museum of the industrial photos of Bernd and Hilla Becker on the occasion of their receiving of the Erasmus Prize: the two of them have almost single-handedly invented this genre of the typology of industrial buildings.) The Germans are exorcising the snobbery that equated Old and High Class with architectural achievement. It is a development that deserves to be emulated throughout the world.