Maximillian Sternberg: Hans Dollgast: Designing in history

Scars of experience

0:00Hello. In an age bedevilled by the lure of the new, and, worse, an obligation to eternal youthfulness, the notion of maintaining the scars of experience seems a bit old-fashioned. If you can look eternally refreshed, you probably better had, lest more sprightly folk get tired of your wrinkles and decay, to hell with the beauty of time writ large on anything, let alone any body. If you recognise that, you should probably listen to Professor Max Sternberg discuss the Bavarian architect Hans Doolgast, the subject of his latest book, Hans Doolgast, Reconstruction and Modernity, which is being published by Lund Humphreys in late September

0:31this year. Born in 1891 and surviving all Germany's many troubles to 1974, Doolgast is known chiefly for his post-war reconstruction work in Munich. However, Max argues, in this he has been misread. Rather than an ambivalent light-touch ruin architect, his post-war reconstructions in fact grew from a consistent ethos of an anti-dogmatic middle ground embracing plurality, revealed in history materialised in accumulated city fabric. As such, his work of retaining the war scars of the Alta Pina Cotec, for example, serve as an act of resistance to cultural and political

1:02amnesia, to wanting to forget and discard.

1:07Feel free to support the A is for Architecture podcast via the Patreon or buy me a coffee link in the podcast description, where you will also find links to Max and the book. A is for Architecture, a podcast about architecture, buildings, urban culture and space.

1:25Hello and welcome to another episode of the A is for Architecture podcast. I'm talking today to Professor Maximilian Sternberg. Max, thanks so much for joining me. I'm very interested and excited to talk about your book, which we're going to be discussing, Hans Doolgast, Reconstruction and Modernity, which you are publishing with Lund Humphreys and I think is coming out in September. If I'm right. That's right. Yeah. End of September. Yeah. It's a beautiful piece of work as all Lund Humphreys books are beautifully produced and

1:56fascinating characters to discuss. But before we get into the book, Max, would you be so kind, as all my guests are asked to do, to introduce yourself, please?

Tracing medieval architectures

2:05Thank you, Ambrose. Thanks for having me on your podcast. Yeah. So my name is Max Sternberg. As you mentioned, I teach history and theory of architecture in Cambridge, originally trained as a historian, and then I did my master's and PhD in history and theory of architecture and have, that was at Cambridge and have stayed at the department in various guises since then. My PhD work was on medieval architecture, monastic architecture. I looked at the Cistercian order in France in the 12th and 13th centuries, and that really looked at the social functions of monastic architecture and the

2:38relationship of monasteries and cities. Then my postdoc was quite a change of tack. I worked with my former supervisor on a project called Conflict in Cities, and I worked on Jerusalem. So very large multidisciplinary research project funded by the East RC. And essentially, I looked at the politics of heritage from the late 19th century into into the present. So it looked at religious sites again, but very much from a social and political vantage point, and it's sort of urban impact, urban impact of the politics of heritage.

3:14And then I got my permanent position in the department and tried to somehow synthesize these rather disparate strands. It felt like I'd done a PhD in medieval architecture and then another PhD in urban geography. And shifted my attention to the 20th century, start developing an interest in the reception of medieval architecture and culture in modern architecture. So appropriations of the past in different strands of modern architecture. And that's been a consistent interest, apart from

3:47various collaborative projects I've also done on the side, some work with a very dear colleague, Sofia Niewarty on Alva Auto. But then sort of thought I would take an excursus and work on Hans Dölgast. He's from Munich, I'm from Munich, I sort of grew up with him in a way. And I thought I'd do one or two articles. And that sort of snowballed, as things do in academia, into a fully-fledged monograph. And that's essentially been in the works for the best part of seven years with various other

4:19things. So I'm sort of delighted and relieved that it's coming out now. So I've spent a lot of time with Dölgast, you know, since my previous sabbatical. And I'm currently on sabbatical, which has allowed me to bring the book over the line. That sounds very lovely, sabbaticals being as they are, as rare as hen's teeth these days. So who was your supervisor in your PhD? Wendy Pullen, who, I mean, I've sort of, in a way, followed her tracks to some extent. I mean, she's an architect and art historian, but by training, but worked on late Roman or early

4:55Christian Jerusalem, and also worked on the early Middle Ages. And then also did this quite significant shift in her career 20 odd years ago, looking at conflict in Jerusalem, which have this wonderful knowledge of the medieval city, that she has research expertise on Islamic architecture, and so forth. And so was a brilliant supervisor for the work on monastic architecture. But she was also a wonderful bridge into modern urban territory. So that was really, you know, very

5:28influential for me, both someone who's able to sort of competently and expertly accompany the work on on the Middle Ages, and then sort of allowed me to see that you can meaningfully contribute to 19th and 20th century architecture with that training in an earlier period. And so you have gaps, but you also have additional perspectives. Yeah. And when I was looking at your CV, I was looking at it yesterday, and I was looking at this work that you had done on medieval architecture. And I was interested in that. I did my master's

6:02dissertation on Lincoln Cathedral, and I've always have been very fascinated by the sacred in medieval

6:11Europe. But then I saw this image on page 44 of your book, of this Viking ship in front of strange neo-classical building in, I think it's in Berlin, isn't it?

Nazi spectacles and dark moments

6:25That's in Munich. That is the terrifying Haus der deutschen Kunst, the house of German art. That was opened in 1937 by Hitler. Yeah, that was the sugar. That's a strange, I mean, it's an exquisite photograph of this golden Viking ship on a float, and there's a Nazi flag in the, in the, on the right hand side. And I thought, ah, right, I can see now some sort of made some connections, this kind of sacredness, medievalness,

6:57pre-medieval, I guess. And then obviously Dorgast himself operating partly through that period as well. Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. No, that, I mean, that's such an interesting image to start with because it sort of captures the abuse of themes that, that, you know, run through a lot of modern architecture in Germany that are of interest to Dorgast, that he got, got onto early, you know, starting even before the first world war in his education. And, but then is, is obviously brought to, to the most perverse of, of heads in, in that period. And I mean, he, like almost everyone in the

7:29city was, was drawn into the production of this huge procession that lasted. Yeah. The whole festivities lasted for, for four days, something like 24,000 people were involved in, in this spectacle because the foundation stone of the, of this new German museum was laid in 33 and then in 37 it opens. Uh, the design is by Paul Toost, who was Hitler's favorite architect. Toost by then is dead, but it's executed reasonably faithfully to his designs. Toost had originally worked on ocean liners and so on.

8:03Um, and, um, and, um, and then the first set of exhibitions are, are infamously this exhibition of degenerated art. And, and then the, the, the exhibition on, on German art and the former being very popular, ostensibly serving to, to derive modernism. And, and then, and then the, the, the, the, the second, um, producing, you know, extraordinarily mediocre art that, that, you know, people are generally too embarrassed to, to even remember today. Um, for, for a while, I, I, I was rather that, I thought that was one of the darkest moments in his career to have,

8:37you know, um, lent his talents and interest in, in, in these themes, um, to the parade. In fact, the designs were, were by, by senior professors that were extremely well-regarded already by the regime who had leadership roles and, and he sort of, um, executed sort of designs, technical drawings, and, and, and, and, you know, with great facility and there's no evidence that he didn't enjoy doing it. Um, by 37, there's a question of how much choice you had in, in, in collaborating

9:07in such an endeavor or not. And, and not that you would end up in a concentration camp if you didn't, but, but that would certainly question, you know, you're, whether you would, whether you'd be still in the running for a position at university. At that point, Dörgast has very little work on, he he's, he's a adjunct, um, professor in the department. I mean, not even a professor, he's simply an adjunct lecturer in, in, in, in the faculty of architecture, the technical university in Munich. And, you know, he's, he's publishing his first book and, and he's doing these drawings,

9:38but the designs weren't by him. So that, that sort of, what is called a Germanic ship, that looks like a Viking ship, this golden barge in front of the, this kind of stripped classicism of toast, um, are, are simply, um, you know, that there are designs by someone else. And, and, and he wasn't at that point sufficiently prominent or, or, or favored to, to have done the designs himself, because that, that would have indicated something darker. I think there's, there's, there's plenty of, there's plenty of evidence or, or, or, or question marks, uh, in, about Dörgast's

10:08complicity and his career at university, his, his, his planning in, in occupied Poland, and so on and so forth. But, um, but, but he, he didn't, you know, his career was, was relatively late and, and, and delayed. And other people who came to the fore much more powerfully and really tried early on. And, and yeah, we can get to that perhaps later. Yeah. I think that, I think that would be, it would be very interesting to get to it. And I think there's something interesting, some interesting parallels about architects and moral ambivalence as well, pertinent to our own

10:42times. Um, and some of the work that we shouldn't mention any names because we'll get sued for libel. I don't want to, um, be sued for libel, but I want to rewind a little bit and, and well, all the way to the beginning of his life and hear who he was, who was Hans Dörgast. And I guess there's a methodological question at the heart of this as well, which is that, as I understand, it didn't leave behind significant writings, but left behind a lot of drawing and buildings. So I guess the

11:15methodological side of it is how do you write a history without the usual kind of, uh, the luxury, I suppose, of self-description through writing that you get with other modernist figures. But yeah, maybe we can start right at the beginning. Who was he? Where did he come from?

Childhood on the Danube

11:28So, I mean, he's, he's from Northern Bavaria, um, born in 1891 in a lower middle class, um, family aspirational, you might call them. His, um, father was a school teacher, secondary school teacher, you know, born in a village near the city of Neuburg on the Danube, which is a, you know, provincial German city with some beautiful medieval and Baroque architecture right on the Danube with a gorgeous bridge. It's a sort of Prague and small at a provincial scale. Um, and Durgas in his writings

12:00from the forties and fifties, um, as he writes biographically, um, idealizes his, his childhood in rural Bavaria. He, he, he makes a lot of, of the sense that this was on the boundaries of the Roman empire. So he's, he, he, he very strongly feels this kind of, um, sense of belonging to, um, the sort of legacy of the Roman empire. And in fact, that, that the Limes, the, the, the boundaries of the Roman empire are, are a privileged site of, of Roman heritage, because, you know, as he says,

12:32you know, Roman fortifications are more densely laid out and, you know, a farmer might, might just sort of, you know, find bits of Roman pottery or, or, or other material remains as he plows the fields and so on and so forth. So, so that's his background. He, he then goes to, um, secondary school gymnasium in German. So that's, you know, the closest equivalent would be a grammar school. So this is a state school, but, but one that is competitive to get into and, and offers the very best education, um, that, uh, that, that is available in, in Wilhelm in Germany and the Germany

13:07of, you know, the turn of the century up to the first world war, huge emphasis on, on Latin and Greek. And so he would have had those languages. He would have been immersed in, in that he wants to become a painter. And there's a professor from the Fine Arts Academy who regularly comes to Neuburg to give, um, lessons, art lessons in, in, in, in his school. And he notices him and, and sees his talent. Uh, in fact, when Dörgast at some point got into trouble, you know, playing a prank, it was his art teacher who sort of saved his bacon and, and allowed him to complete his studies. Um, but the parents sort of say, look, you know, painter is very nice, but, but shouldn't you choose

13:41a profession? And then he sort of, you know, chooses to study architecture in Munich. And when he arrives, uh, aged 18 in the city, he hadn't visited it before. So he lived, you know, quite a local life, uh, you know, on the Danube in this provincial city up to then, but he has this kind of fabulous education, extraordinary kind of understanding of, of, you know, canonical literature as, as it was defined, uh, in, in, in Germany, turn of the century, that would have meant that he had, you know, would have spent years reading Goethe, Schiller, and, and, you know, the German idealists

14:15and, and, and romantics had this fabulous command of Latin and, and, um, and Greek had this painterly education, um, but also had access to things like Jugend, the, the, the, the, the, the main journal of, of the arts and crafts of the Jugendstil in, in, in Munich. So he was already in Sensippissimus, which is another sort of avant-garde magazine. So you would have had access to magazines and quite a, you know, that was a very rich scene. I mean, you know, essentially all of the sort of key cultural figures in Germany would have published at some point or another

14:45in these two journals. Um, so he's exposed to that, but he comes to the city in 1910 and, and studies architecture and, and quite quickly, I think, um, reveals himself to be gifted, talented, versatile, well-liked by his teachers. Um, he, he calls himself in the 1950s, an artistic stray dog in the sense that he's sort of open and curious about everything, skeptical about any particular strand or, or going down a particular route. Um, but, but just sort of curious.

15:17And, and Munich at that moment is, is maybe culturally as dynamic as, as Berlin. I mean, you might say that Berlin by, by the first world war and certainly by the 1920s clearly has the initiative, but, but, um, Munich can, can sort of in some regards compete with Vienna and Berlin as a cultural center in this period, particularly in theater, in music, to some extent in kind of cabaret culture, uh, particularly in, in art history and art criticism and sort of art theory and sort of emerging, this emerging body of, of, of art theory that, that will impact, um, you know,

15:53modernist discourse. So just think, you know, very fling perhaps, and then someone like Siegfried Gedeon doing his PhD with Wolflin in Munich. So, so Munich is, is in terms of, you know, theories of empathy, uh, uh, that Munich is a major place. And he, and he says, you know, he went to the, he regularly went to, to see concerts and, and operas. So he loved music. He loved theater. So he definitely was aware of the culture around him and because he was a very gifted draftsman, perhaps the most gifted student for his drawing skills in his generation. And he's quite humble. So he, you know,

16:26he, he doesn't sort of make such claims that are unfounded, um, but it's also fascinated, um, by history and, and wins a prize shortly before the first world war for, um, his study of the, the letters of Pliny, the younger, uh, which described, um, Pliny's villas, porticoed villas and, and reconstructs them, which had, you know, preoccupied architects for, for, for several centuries. And he wins a prize for that. So he's a gifted student in, in, in, in art history. And as he says,

16:57he heard many more lectures, um, elsewhere than, than in his own faculty. So he, he was, you know, extraordinarily curious and, you know, seemed to absorb everything that Munich had to, to offer at that point. So it's, it's, it's a local, you might say provincial, but, but really Munich is, is sort of as dynamic, uh, an environment as, as anywhere else in Germany at that point. And the architecture faculty, the technical university in Munich is the most popular school at that point. So people like Gropius had spent several years studying in Munich. So Munich was probably the, or one of two or three

17:31leading schools of architecture in Germany in this period. So he, in a way, got the best education he could possibly have asked for both in secondary school and then, then at university and culturally through theater, music and literature. So he's sort of fully embedded within the modernist trajectory. I think as I put in my notes to you, and as made clear in your book, you know, obviously Berlin and Vienna have this kind of reputation for these sites that are being the sites of modernity or modernism, modernism, perhaps more accurately. Was Bavaria, was Munich tied into that? I mean, obviously the characters

18:06that you've mentioned, some of the major players within emergent modernist thinking are there. Was the school that he was part of starting to play that game, or was it very much an inflected thing? And how is this realized, I guess, in Dorgast himself? Because I'm intrigued by this notion of his interest in being at the edge of the empire, of the Roman empire, which has a kind of provincial feel, as you say, to it, but also by its very nature then ties this little part of the world,

18:37his little part of the world, into a much larger story. So to what extent was Dorgast, his imagination and his intellect related to that broader Central European modernism? I mean, my sense is that he's involved in it, he's at close quarters, he's interested, he's curious. I think there's a sense that perhaps somehow, you know, and that may have something to do with the experience of being on the Western front for four years, and so on, is there's a certain kind of restraint and skepticism. You know, he doesn't, I don't think he's someone who picks up, you know,

19:11towards an architecture whenever it was published in the early 20s, and is kind of completely bowled over by it and sort of, you know, has, you know, a strong revolutionary interests and, you know, a fascination with kind of creative destruction and so on and so forth. There's a sort of restraint, and he says himself, you know, if you, you know, because he had that very strong grounding and very strong education prior to the First World War, he kind of sat in a saddle quite firmly, not to be completely swept away by, you know, some of the more extreme promises of kind of modernist discourse.

19:47But I think he, I mean, it goes also back to the question of like, so how do we interpret Munich? And to what extent is Munich sort of an incidental background to a host of characters who happened to be in the city? It was a pleasant city, it's the most Italian of German cities, it has good weather, it has pleasant beer gardens, it's convivial. You know, someone like Thomas Mann sort of is very much a North German, but he happens to marry a wealthy, into a wealthy German Jewish family who happens to be in Munich, and he's there as he's enjoying the comforts of that environment. And he himself,

20:20you know, there's this famous saying or writing by Thomas Mann, which says, you know, Munich is resplendent or Munich shines. So there was a sense that it was a, you know, it was a sort of bourgeois bohemian place and a place for literary and cultural and artistic production and hospitable to it. And at the same time, you know, certainly we'll get to that by the 1920s, by the time the, you know, the Nazi party uses it as a base and various kind of counter-revolutionary trends

20:53are very apparent there. There's a sense that, you know, Munich hasn't properly absorbed that modernist culture, that Munich, you know, that it was perhaps shallow, that it wasn't, you know, wasn't able to put down these strong roots and that these kind of modernist tendencies would go, you know, that Munich might have made decisive contributions to something like Dada, but Dada happened in exile in Zurich and, you know, Paris and Vienna and Berlin would be these more propitious places for modernist discourse. I think at the same time already, there was a strand of kind of southern

21:26modernist discourse that was sort of moderate to some extent. You know, Munich is also a city that doesn't have a huge working class. It's not, it's a kind of cultural capital. It's not a place of political power in that sense. Bavaria sort of gave up on being a leading German state, competing with the Prussians and the Austrians for supremacy, you know, in the course of the 18th century, if not the 17th century. And so by the 19th century, the programme is museums and theatres

21:56and sort of cultural leadership of the smaller German states and finding some middle ground between North and South being both in the orbit of a kind of emerging German empires, as well as part of the kind of Austro-Hungarian and Central European world you're discussing. And that the journal Jugend is quite interesting. It does, it attempts to educate a middle class and their tastes and it's sort of open for novelty, but it's not calling for revolution or explicit upheaval, nor does it

22:27try to shock. I think that sort of open-minded pluralist spirit that is nevertheless, you know, grounded and skeptical of some of the more extreme demands, which is in part to do with this, that provincial setting of Munich is part of the story. And he sort of seems to absorb that. He does,

Provincial roots and modernity

22:46he never sort of reneges on his origins. He doesn't sort of, like Le Corbusier would sort of sublimate some of his Alpine background, but he's very firmly, you know, chooses Paris and French identity and reconstructs himself, reinvents himself completely. You know, Dorgas sort of at least claims to to some extent remain true to these origins in a more provincial setting. But I mean, it's important to remember that fundamentally German culture is, it's a nation of provincials as a famous title of an

23:17American historian. Berlin is the exception and Berlin comes on quite late and that it becomes this kind of a major city is actually quite a fleeting moment, you know, and Berlin is not necessarily more significant than Frankfurt or Cologne or Düsseldorf or Hamburg or Munich. It's much more distributed. And so that sort of sense of this provincial environment that either hasn't seen industrialization or has seen industrialization much later than the French or the British, that that is part of German culture. So I think sometimes when British and American scholars come to Germany,

23:49they sort of expect Berlin to be what London and Paris are. But Berlin was never that. You know, it had its moments, but it's not, that was, as I said, exceptional rather than the norm of, you know, a capital city producing one major cultural movement after another. That makes sense. Yeah, no, it's, that's really, really interesting. And you're right, that's quite a surprising idea. It's much more like a federation. Yeah, yeah. I mean, that's what it's called to this day. It's the Federal Republic of Germany. No, no, for sure. But it's just, it's just, I guess, just because in, certainly in my imagination,

24:23as a British person, Germany is this big thing, and a bogeyman in some respects, historically. I was thinking, I wondered to what extent that's tied into the fact that, unlike France, and unlike Britain, German's global imperial agenda was more muted. And I wonder whether that federatedness is the thing that puts that in check, to some degree, but also changes the nature of the relationship to those colonial places that it does occupy. I mean, these are complicated, probably unanswerable things.

24:58No, I mean, as you say that, that's quite a broad subject. And it's certainly something that, you know, we, I think we're all of us have learned to be more alert to colonial imperial dimensions, and that, you know, there was a tendency, amongst historians of Germany, and certainly amongst historians of smaller Central European states to think of colonialism and imperialism as something, you know, far away that ultimately is, you know, was led by Portugal, Spain, Britain, and France. Those are the major Atlantic colonial powers. And then sort of the Central European and Mediterranean

25:29world is sort of almost unrelated to it, or only very indirectly. And that has changed. You might say that Munich is, because it's not a massive power base within, politically speaking, in Germany, that it, it, you know, what, you know, it'd be really interesting to know, I mean, there's sort of no evidence in Dürger's writings that he, he was, you know, open alert and interested in terms of what was going on overseas, or how he would have, you know, colonial wares,

26:02and so on and so forth. There's certainly interesting revisionist scholarship, um, about generally German architecture and colonialism, and that, you know, the Germans did have colonies and an empire, and, and it committed a genocide in Namibia, amongst others. And given that it was brief, and not so extensive, it was very violent. And it's certainly that the ambition was there. But I mean, that's, that's very well known fact that Germans, Germany's geopolitical situation between France, Britain, and Russia never really allowed itself to, to establish a kind of hegemony

26:37over Europe, sufficiently in a stable manner to then create an overseas empire, and so on and so forth. So that, that, and that, that has created the violence of German history, that it both unified late, is, is not a stable entity as a nation state, and has this kind of, um, hasn't quenched its kind of imperial ambitions, and then sort of unleashes it in Europe, because it was unable to do so overseas. I mean, but, but I mean, I'm no historian of geopolitics, I should probably stop there. I mean, you have asked that question methodologically about, about Dürger's writings.

27:09I thought, I just, I wanted to, I think you've captured it very well. And we can talk about that if you'd like. Um, I, I just thought there was one thing I wanted to slightly, um, push back on.

Books and surviving drawings

27:21He has left a relatively substantial sort of corpus of published texts. Um, and that's perhaps one of the things I'm trying to correct in the book is that we see him as a gifted designer, as a, as a, as a, you know, hugely talented teacher, or Rivera teacher, as an influential teacher to some extent, but someone who just, you know, occasionally gave a lecture or wrote a tiny book and, and, and rather cryptic and so on and so forth. You know, he published about 12 books, and there are a number of lectures and shorter essays. And that's, that's a pretty respectable tally, I would say,

27:53for a historian of his generation. If you think, you know, Mies van der Rohe is, what, a handful of lectures, you know, mostly transcription. So if you look at the main volume in English that, that translates the most important things that we know of Mies van der Rohe, it's, it's about 80 pages or something like that. It's, it's next to nothing. Um, you know, even Gropius, you know, he wrote, you know, quite a bit, but it's not, doesn't go to, to anything, um, like Le Corbusier's output of, of 50, you know, fairly substantial, um, books. But I would say a dozen books, um, compared to architects who,

28:28other writing, thinking architects like Heinrich Tesseno or, or, um, or Fischer, Theodor Fischer, that's, he's still part of a tradition of writing architects who primarily teach and practice, but, but who have things to say and are, have a capacity to write with great fluency and a certain literary quality. And, and he puts it down and he has a variety of publications, you know, a number of publications are sort of written up lectures, but the, he does, there's lovely examples of how he sort of, you know, how much care he put into the mise en page of his books and, and,

29:00you know, carefully looking at, you know, reworking the drawings, having them reproduced, having them reduced, placing them on the page and writing. What we don't have for Delgast is, are the, any of the personal papers. So apparently he was a very avid letter writer. So he would sort of start in the morning with, with lots of drawing, you know, then the, during the day, it's teaching and, and meeting clients and talking to his employees and so on. And in the evening, he would write letters. And there are a small number of letters that, that, that have survived, that are reprinted elsewhere. And they're really interesting. And I'm sure there are thousands

29:33of letters, but unless, and like Le Corbusier again, he was not someone who equivocally kept his things. I don't think he kept copies of his letters. And, and then he died without children. There was a nephew, there was a wife as well, and no children, as I said, and, and someone who essentially had been his collaborator and, and lover in all likelihood. And so the, the estate sort of got spread. And so the, a good number of the drawings have, have survived and they're really the most precious thing. But as I said, there may be 12 books and 12 shorter texts, essays,

30:06and they're quite valuable. And, and, and, but they sort of resist interpretation, which is another phenomenon of, of Döger's that he doesn't, you know, he sort of, he draws you in. And then I think I've really found myself trying to sort of peel this onion and peeling away and peeling away and peeling away and, and, and that that's become the process. And you never really get to a core that is sort of, and now I've undiscovered, discovered who he is or unlocked it. But, but between the build work, the designs that were unexecuted, and there's publications that are quite varied, that also

30:38capture the teaching, there's a reasonable source base. Or so, so that I don't think methodologically I'd had to do anything crazy, except that I, the emphasis is on the work rather than the biography. And I don't think I, I would have written a particularly appealing biography. I don't really read biographies myself very much. So I'm not sure I would have been a very competent biographer. Yes. Well, I stand corrected. That's very interesting. 12 books is, is quite an output. I mean, they're short, you know, I can, you know, but, but still they're books.

31:09Yeah, for sure. But the drawings themselves are exquisite. And one of the things I noted going through the book, and they are beautifully presented, is that there is this, they're very varied in their interests, their subjects. They are very varied in their styles. He goes from beautiful washes, beautiful sort of watercolor washes, all the way through to sort of technical plans. But a lot of them are these very elegant pen or pencil perspectives. Yeah. And he seems to, as I understand it, and you again, correct me if I'm wrong, seems to

31:42be trying in a way to capture something of the tradition of the European city of, of his part of Munich. There seems to be a strong interest in the tradition of architecture, whether that's the classical tradition or the vernacular tradition. How does that sit within his kind of broader modernist milieu? Does he recognize or is he consciously making a sort of case for, in a way, like an early Colin Rowe, you know, or Gordon Cullen, making a case for the role of existing fabric,

32:18of history, of tradition, of conservation within the modernist discourse?

Collage city and perspective

32:24No, that's really well put. I mean, just to pick up on what you ended on, I think, I think absolutely he prefigures Rowe, or you could speak of a certain parallel. If we think of Collage City, I think that is the result of seminars that he started developing from the 50s. You know, that's when Dörgast publishes most of his important books. And that is something that is based on lectures and drawings he did from the late 20s, 30s, and 40s. So Dörgast is older. But it's also

32:57funny that Collage City spends a lot of time in Munich. It's one of the less committed things with regard to Collage City that he has about, you know, 15 pages or so on Munich and speaks of it as this amiable city, speaks of, or they, Kötter, and Rose speak of Munich as the kind of fullest realization of Napoleon's vision of the city as museum or city as a kind of collage of museums, and all these very set pieces. And that Rose sort of feels ambiguous about that, but also sees a kind

33:28of potential there that has a kind of relevance. And absolutely, I think the interest in the existing and working within the tradition of the European City, that's completely what Dörgast is interested in. I mean, one of the things that's striking is that despite working for Peter Behrens in the 20s,

33:45and having worked perhaps even more importantly for Riemerschmidt, when they were still working on Hellerau, so the garden city iteration of Germany, you know, near Dresden, having been exposed to these leading architects who kind of churn out housing and who are pioneers of housing and sort of trying to create alternative cities. He has no interest in the garden city. He doesn't seem to think that there's any mileage. And that's what I find, that's the untimeliness of Dörgast. He doesn't, he seems to rarely sort of go with where the majority are heading. And I think that's

34:20a, and that's quite, I think, particular to him that, you know, you could relate that to his context and Munich. You know, Munich doesn't really have substantial garden cities, certainly not in the 20s. Their sort of social housing projects, minimum dwelling and so on, are much more resolutely urban and attempt to be civic. And that's why Dörgast contributes so successfully to it, because I think that chimes with his own interests in the city. So despite his fascination for the vernacular and

34:52idealizing his rural background, he's very much an urbanite. You know, he comes to Munich, he falls in love with the place. He does spend five years in Vienna. So he's also exposed to that. We haven't talked about his kind of years of apprenticeship, which are really part of his education, really. He only sets up his own practice in 1927. So he does work with Riemerschmidt and Behrens, you know, you might say the outstanding designers, architects of their generation, you know, famously where Mies van der Rohe and Gropius also work, you know, for Peter Behrens.

35:24And I think people said, oh, well, by the 20s, Behrens was no longer as avant-garde. I think that's an unhelpful realization. He was an enormously interesting architect. He continued to do interesting things in the 1920s. He was extremely well-regarded and influential. And whatever he might have imparted to to Korb and Mies, he certainly imparted in bags to Dörgast, because Dörgast not only apprenticed there, he was really the leading architects for Behrens in the 1920s. He taught drawing, and he really starts teaching drawing, you know, in the Technical University and becomes the kind of

35:59the professor for that from the 20s to the 50s. And his legacy is felt in the school to this day. And one of the main prizes in the Technical University is the Dörgast Prize, not for drawing, but essentially that. And the people who teach drawing are very aware of his tradition. And he came out of a long-standing tradition that emerged in the 19th century. And Dörgast does hold on to that and extraordinarily loyal to it and becomes a virtue also of that practice of delivering drawing.

36:30And it's funny that he doesn't really sketch, the very few sketches that have survived of his, you know, the little scribbles, that which the modernists prized, you know, almost above all, you know, Alto or Le Corbusier doing these alluring conceptual sketches of environments, sites, you know, design ideas with just a few lines that are so powerful, you know, what someone like William Curtis, you know, speaks about so eloquently. And he doesn't do that and even says he doesn't really see the point. He says either you draw, and then you go for it, or you don't, but he doesn't see

37:03the sort of the point of the little sketch. It's quite curious. And his practice was he would have, you know, an A5 sketchbook in his sort of pocket, in his jacket or his shirt. And he would go around with a pencil, typically, on a Sunday with his watercolors. And he might draw the same site four or five times over several days, and then he would go back. And then with ink, he was a master of the ink drawing, would rework it, and very often with publication in mind already. And also,

37:34he had this extraordinary because he was the way you taught was that students would draw live with the professor. And then the sketchbook was stamped. And that was basically what to demonstrate that you've completed the course, you had a full sketchbook of things that you were copying, you know, any building, any situation, abstract geometries, and so on. And Dergass was constantly drawing these extremely precise perspectives on a blackboard, you know. And he had about, at some point he taught 30 hours, he delivered 30 hours of, or 15 hours of contact time with 10 hours of preparation, you know,

38:06a week in a semester, while he carried out all these projects, and published, and did typography, and planning, and so on and so forth. But I think the fact that he holds on to perspective, and I think you're absolutely right, it has something to do with capturing the city, and the theatre of the city, which we might talk about later, is fundamental to him holding on to perspective. And toward the end of his life, he sort of says, yes, I'm aware, there's now discussion that perspective is really very Eurocentric, and it's not even that old, and so on and so forth. And he sort of, you can see him thinking, well, fine, I can accept that, but it's still about

38:41400 or 500 years old, and it's a pretty powerful tool, and I'm not prepared to let go of it. And he draws some stunning axonometric, so he's perfectly able to, you know, he masters the axo, but he doesn't particularly use it in design. And I think that's where he, you know, there's a kind of critical distance to the avant-garde, and to modernist kind of discourse, and the modernist ethos. And that's an interesting question now. Does that make him dated, or passiist, or does it make him anticipating trends that followed modernism? So he's sort of,

39:17he's out of time in that sense. He always seems to hark back to something that seems to be at that moment dated, or something that anticipates what is then subsequently regarded as pretty avant-garde and cutting edge 10, 15, 20 years later. It's a fascinating idea. And I do like your linking of this use of perspective and this use of very, very detailed and sensitive drawings as a kind of, I guess, a sort of quiet resistance to the reductionist, modernist city as a diagram, building as a diagram. Sort of, dare I say it,

39:49architecture as a one-liner, which I think we've definitely come to now. Well, maybe we're moving past it again, but certainly in the early 21st century, that idea of the essential sketch, I think it's not done the practice of design many favors, actually. Yeah. Yeah. And I think you're putting that well. I mean, again, like someone, so Dörgast is, he doesn't, he does speak about contemporary architecture. I mean, sometimes it is said that, you know, his lectures, you know, referenced everything but contemporary architecture. It's not

40:20true. Modern architecture, 20th century architecture, the architecture of his contemporaries, whether German or beyond, were definitely present, like almost anything else. There's really nothing that is completely absent in Dörgast, but he's quite critical of Mies van der Rohe and sees him as, at least presents him as someone who imposes space on people rather than trying to tease out space that might be hospitable to, you know, human events and actions and experiences. But he certainly has admiration for Le Corbusier. You know, there's, I think he fully

40:50acknowledges that, that, you know, he's that Olympian figure and he's quite sort of discreet in his criticism, but he does say, he calls him a painter poet. And he says, you know, you can find everything there except for spaces. So there's a certain, I think there's a, there's a sense that this is all extremely impressive, but, but does it serve making place, is what he's saying. And, and, and he often speaks of, of a sort of, you know, he suggests it's a kind of escapism. And there's an abstraction

41:23that he absolutely, at some point, that's, that's where Dörgast stops and becomes almost intolerant of, of, of very bold experimentation, destructive, you know, creative destruction and, and, and more radical forms of abstraction that, that he tends to then critique. And again, one can think about why is it that he has that sort of skepticism? Yeah. And there's lots to be said on that, but I wanted to move on to this particular word that's used in relation to Dörgast, which is this,

Joyful architecture and heiterkeit

41:54and I'm probably going to mangle it because I always do, heiterkeit. That's a pretty good rendering. The idea of untroubled cheerfulness. Is that a, is that a good definition of it? I'm not sure about untroubled, although I think it can have that connotation. So yes, heiter is, is cheerful or joyful, or it can also be sort of light, a certain lightness. Heiterkeit is simply that as a noun. And it's, it's, again, it's a sort of word that was already,

42:25was a favorite word of Goethe. And so, I mean, a lot of things in German culture, particularly for that generation of the turn of the century, can be traced back to, to, to Goethe on some extent. And that goes for Nordic architects too. I mean, you know, the decisive book is probably still Goethe's Italian journey for, for many, many German architects and any educated German has that sort of sense of, you know, at some point you look out to nature through your window sternly and contemplatively, and you recite some Goethe. And then, you know, then you are German, then you are modern, and then you're cultural. I mean, that it's, it's, it's ridiculous, but that really

42:57is the case in German 20th century culture. And, and so, heiter is a favorite word of, of, of Goethe. And heiter often that, you know, it can, it can be used in relation to, to nature, to art. Um, there's a, you know, famous sort of, uh, uh, phrase by Schiller where he says, you know, life is serious. Art is heiter, you know, art is joyful, light, entertaining, playful. So I think ultimately in Dörgast, the word heiterkeit, because he does have this

43:28book entitled Heitere Baukunst. So he uses Baukunst rather than Architektur. That's already quite German to, to, to, and that harks back to, you know, architecture as, as part of a kind of tradition and, and not merely something either technical or, or future orientated. So, so Baukunst, but people like Hugo Hering were also very keen on, on Baukunst, art building, the art of building rather than architecture, which is merely sort of French. Um, and, uh, and so he has this notion of,

43:58of, of, of cheerful, joyful architecture. And, and I mean, those are literally the lectures he gave in 1943. So you think, well, that's pure escapism, you know, how can you speak of joy in 1943, not only when you've unleashed unspeakable violence on the whole of year, but you're also now increasingly subject to aerial bombardment and the, the, the world around you is kind of falling apart. And so I think that, that is certainly a story, but, but it's that where it exists, um, in German architectural discourse and aesthetic discourse already, and it goes back to Goethe. And I think in, in my mind,

44:33it relates to both, um, theater and play and, and, and the everyday, right. That, that you, you, you can sort of, and it's sort of his key to, to architectural history. You know, whenever you find something that is fun that doesn't take itself too seriously, whether it's in a Roman mosaic, you know, he starts off that book, he starts off with, you know, a play of illusion in, in, in Pompeii and mosaics. And he says, isn't this, you know, it's trickery. It's, but it's also enchantment that you can sort of

45:05enchant people, environments, you know, through, through this kind of joy and, and, and, and play. Um, but I suppose it's also this kind of, you know, the, yeah, it's, it's also refusal to see architecture as very political or, or, or also keeping the sort of the, the, the politics and all the sort of turmoil and, and, and, and, you know, rises and collapses and crises at a certain kind of, at, at, at, at bay, you might say. But, um, but again, I think it's quite, you, you could

45:38again, think of, you know, team 10 and the, the sort of emerging embrace of the everyday as a, as a critique of the modern, but attempting to extend it. And, and, and, you know, the Smithsons and, and taking joy and looking at children playing in the Victorian street and, and then trying to project that onto streets in the sky and so on. So there's a sense, I think that that's, I think Dörgast would have seen as heiterkeit. And, and I think that that's, there's a sort of shared interest there, um, that, that, you know, architecture is, is potentially a series of events that, that people can partake of about, um, but, but he, you know, he, he, he does also have an eye for the

46:14tragic, Dörgast. I mean, you know, in a way tragedy was always around him, but, but he doesn't, it's not like he doesn't acknowledge that. But even there, he says, you know, he says even death is a sort of, um, is a, is a, you know, as a kind of clown of sorts or, or a jester. So he, he tends to sort of insert the serious and the joyful, but also find sort of redeeming moments of joy in, in, in what otherwise would be seen as simply tragic or, or, or, you know, just simply a question

46:46of commemorating trauma. So that's another really interesting facet of this, but I suppose it's, it's, I mean, perhaps the first world war is, is, is a decisive experience there that if he writes very movingly about his four years, and if you think that 20 people in his, in his, from the university went to, to be in his regiment, you know, only three returned, you know, one of whom was, was Dörgast, you know, that's quite extraordinary. Um, and he, he speaks about it, not like Ernst Jünger, he doesn't sort of, or, you know, sort of Marinetti doesn't sort of, um, spiritualize or, or, or, or celebrate

47:20violence, nor is he kind of Brechtien, you know, as a kind of pacifist or, or, and critique of violence. He's a sort of, he sees it as largely absurd. And he writes with humor about the horrors that he experienced, you know, burying a, a fellow soldier without his head, because they simply couldn't find, find it, and so on and so forth. But, but he, you know, he writes about it amusingly, you have to laugh when, when you read his memoirs of the first world war. So that's quite a long-winded answer to Heidzakai. I think it's a really loaded term, it's really interesting, and it does many things.

47:51In the way that you describe it, I can see it as a sort of act of resistance to the seriousness that then gets loaded onto architecture very clearly in this modernist functionalism, which makes architecture a sort of super moral agent and a mechanism or device for delivering principally politics, which is a horrible legacy we still live with. Perhaps it's not a horrible legacy. Perhaps, perhaps I shouldn't say that, but yeah, it's a legacy. I think you've, if you've hit the nail on the head that, you know, the, the, the dominant term,

48:25you might say, if you had, if you had to reduce German modernist discourse to one term, you know, from 1900 to the 1950s, it would be Sachlichkeit. You know, that, that's another term, which I'm sure you're familiar with, that is very difficult to translate. It's objectivity, matter of factness, consciousness or, or, or, or, or rationality. Um, but it means that and, and many more things. And, and that's a term that Durgas never uses, or if he does so in a, in a negative sense. To him,

48:56that's clinical. It's dry. It's, it has exactly what you've just described, that sort of super moral agent that he simply refuses. He says that that, that, you know, architecture was never that historically. And, and he sort of says it's, it's, it's, um, he speaks of Saurtöpfe, which means the sort of sour, sour heads or sour pots, who, who, you know, delivers Sauberkeit, this, which is cleanliness through Sachlichkeit. There's something that to him, it's stifling. It, it, it's not, it's not inclusive of,

49:29you know, the sort of accidental, the provisional, the temporary, the, the, the thing that doesn't make sense. And so on. Heiterkeit. Heiterkeit versus Sachlichkeit. And he's definitely an advocate of heiterkeit. And, and, and, and doing that when he did, he was certainly in the minority.

Creative restoration in Munich

49:44Where Durgas is perhaps known most is as an architect of creative restoration. Can you speak to his approach here? Perhaps some examples of where we might see this best represented? Because we're not talking here about, again, erasure or a total reconstruction, but a prefiguring, what we now call adaptive reuse, even conservation. Is that right? Yeah, no, absolutely. I think that that's, that's very well put in. And if he hadn't done those reconstructions, works of repair, from the late 40s into the late 1950s in Munich, you know,

50:18we would not be speaking about him now. I mean, he would not, not become an architect that has been of interest to, you know, Aldo Rossi, or the Smithsons, or James Starling, or David Drupelfield. And, and, and, you know, was admired by, by Rasmussen. So absolutely, you know, in the, from the late 40s, you know, Munich is in, in, in a pretty devastated by, by aerial bombardment. It's not, not, not as famously as, as Hamburg or Dresden or, or some other cities, but it's, it's the old city, the city center is almost completely destroyed, you know, by 60% or so.

50:51And, and a vast amount of the housing stock was, was, was destroyed. And, you know, the debate focused on housing, on infrastructure, on, on, you know, faithful reconstruction, trying to bring back the past or, or going into the future. And there goes, you know, that's ultimately his originality. Shares aspects of, of the discourse of the critical discourse on reconstruction with people like Battening and Schwarz. There were certainly people who were very, very interesting and, and, and, and, and develop really interesting approaches to reconstruction that, that were,

51:22were not simply, you know, tabula rasa or, or, or naive reconstruction. But nevertheless, he, within that sort of quite varied field, he comes up with a really distinct approach and his reconstructions in Munich are all of 19th century monuments. And 19th century monuments at that point that were not particularly valued, or in fact, actively seen as, as, you know, sort of a good riddance almost. Even works and his most famous, single most famous project is the reconstruction

51:53of the Alte Pinakothek. The Alte Pinakothek is the main art gallery of Munich. You know, the equivalent of the, of the, of the, of the national gallery in, in, in the UK and the national gallery to some extent was a, was a model in the sense of a, of a large public collection. And the Alte Pinakothek is the, one of the main works, if not the most famous work of Klenze. Leo von Klenze, who also built, in St. Petersburg and so on, a major European architect, a leading neoclassicist, and perhaps after Schinkel, the most significant German architect of, of his generation, just, just prior

52:27to, to Zemper. So Zemper wanted to work for Klenze, couldn't, and then becomes a leading architect himself, but Klenze is that slightly earlier generation. And the consensus was amongst planners and architects, uh, and architects was that that building, which was badly damaged, you know, should simply be taken away and, and, um, you know, rebuild in a modern form somewhere else, you know, there was no need to, to retain it. And then there were, you know, the more conservative advocates of, of a faithful reconstruction. And then Dörgast doesn't either. He says, it's absurd to try and

53:02rebuild it faithfully. That would cost, you know, 30 million Deutschmark at the time. And it's not even technically feasible. He says, it's not necessary to build it somewhere else for 10 million. I will repair you this building for 3 million. And he did, you know, it's extraordinary. So it was an economic argument that he, that he presented. Um, you know, being quite careful to, to not present arguments, moral arguments or, or, or, or, or arguments to do with the zeitgeist or, or, or, or as other such things of, you know, a kind of theory of reconstruction of why it was

53:36necessary fatefully, the correct thing to either rebuild or build a fresh and, and so on and so forth. So that, that, that kind of, that the, his sort of pluralists, open-minded interest, the, the stray dog at that point, the skeptic is able to kind of keep, keep ideology at bay and, and, and, and, and sort of dogma and looks from what one building to the next, I think, you know, informed by this love of tradition, you know, the existing and, and then sort of making pragmatic arguments about what

54:10could be retained. You know, he had an extraordinary way of then reusing bricks, bricks that were extremely sturdy because not only where the Munich is a, is a place of brick production. So there's a long history going back to the middle ages of building with brick and making brick. And, and that's one of, one of the local industries of the city into the 20th century. So they're good bricks, but because of the, the fire bombing, those bricks are kind of triple baked. So they're incredibly resilient. So thanks to the, the, the Royal Air Force, they're, they're top-notch bricks that you can

54:43reuse and will last forever, you know. And, and he had a way of, as it were, working with, with his craftspeople of, of, you know, with thick mortar and a certain kind of coarseness using that brick and leaving it exposed. That, that's, you know, that's, that's, that, that sort of leads to materiality that has been celebrated in Durgas. So I think that's almost the most famous thing about him is the way he, he treats bricks and repairs brick buildings with, with salvaged brick work. And

55:16then, and then he's generally seen as this very sensitive person who just sort of patches holes, slightly abstracts, but continues a certain found rhythm. And, and then essentially is an artful way of being artless or an artful way of, of, of displaying what the economy of means can produce an architecture and that it can kind of produce things that are, are, are rich from a sensory point of view and, and have a sort of poetic materiality. So that, that's the sort of, I think, and that's

55:49not wrong. And that's the standard way in which we've come to think of Durgas and how he's achieved a certain fame from the 1980s onwards and through a limited number of translations of German text into English, as well as through the photography of, of Klaus Kienold, who was a leading German architectural photographer, who was very interested in, in Scarpa and various other architects, but also Durgas and, and has a beautiful way of rendering in black and white, those, those, those buildings.

56:22So that the, he, Durgas has found amongst photographers, a genuine sort of following. But what slightly get missed, I suppose, in, in, in, in that, in that, in that account is just the variety of what else Durgas did. And so I, I still think the reconstructions are the most interesting thing to consider. And I've got four main chapters in the book and the two final chapters are dedicated to the work of the 1950s. But I tried to really, really hard to dedicate in the first two chapters,

56:54the sort of ethos that, that allowed him to, to become this, this, this kind of pioneer of, of reuse, as you say, of, of, of seeing conservation as a creative task for modern architects, not, not, not an afterthought or not, not a abdication, but actually, as many contemporary architects have done, as a really interesting problem that produces distinctively modern buildings that, that don't have to announce their modernity as something which is, you know, somehow dualistically opposed

57:24or contradicts tradition or history or, or what, however you want to define the other in that sense. So I wanted to show that actually, the way he designs private houses, and, and sort of parish churches in the Bavarian countryside, or the way he writes about homes and dwelling, and the way he teaches architectural history, all of these things are incredibly relevant to his approach to reconstruction, doesn't come out of some theory of reconstruction, or, or particular stance to modernism. In fact,

57:54his critical stance to, to modernism that he sort of picks and chooses from it, he really thinks that he can pick and choose from, from modern currents of architecture, as much as he can pick and choose from older periods, so that it's an ongoing conversation where everything is potentially present and legitimate. That's what allows him to intervene in these buildings in an interesting way. And I think the, this kind of emphasis on materiality has also slightly flattened his reconstructions. There's a sense that it's all about the brickwork and about the tiny interventions. And otherwise, you know, almost leaving those buildings untouched and then, and then leaving some

58:28evidence of, of damage. You know, that's a kind of memorial. Sort of like a, yeah, a memorialization through fragments, which is not, and I, this might seem a little clumsy to you as a sort of circular thing, going back to his childhood, this idea of the remnants of Roman culture being understood through these preserved bits and pieces. It's a sort of archaeological approach. I think that's, that's a lovely thought. I think that, I think that, that, that's right. And, and

58:58again, you might say that he, what marks him out in his generation is that he is attuned to that slightly before the rest of, of, of, of the profession begins to share that. And, but I think that, and, and you might say at the same time, the fragment and the metaphor of the fragment plays a huge role in, in modernist discourse. There was always an interest, you know, from, from Cezanne to surrealism and then through Le Corbusier and countless other interesting architects, there was always an interest in the poetics of the fragment and kind of collaging, you know, metaphors and

59:31allegories and images of derived from, from ritual or, or various, you know, it's not as though even the most radical modernists always have an image of, of history or tradition and so on and so forth. So that, I think in that sense, he's not, he's not unusual, but I think you're absolutely right that he, he's very attentive to and, and constantly records fragments, remnants, and they're sort of literally in his mind or in his hand. And so therefore, just as he records, he also then is able to, to, to design. And in one remarkable thing about his approach to design, which I think is quite,

1:00:04I can't quite think of another architect like it who, who, because you don't have these concept sketches, iterations that would then lead to a more finished design. He almost, for the Alte Pinacotec, he presents six or seven schemes, specifically how to repair the, the sort of main hole in the south facade that are rendered with equal precision and with seemingly no buildup. So he has this kind of these quite detailed perspectives, you know, that still leave a lot of things open, but, and that's quite

1:00:36extraordinary that he had this kind of capacity to see a sort of an outcome, a possibility and draw it in some detail as though it had already, the design had been enacted, recorded, presented, and then sort of throw it out and do something wholly different, you know, the next time, or, you know, that again, their themes that he's interested in and, and so on. So that, that's, that's quite, that's quite remarkable. But, but I suppose,

Discretion over ruinous symbolism

1:00:59again, there's been a tendency to overemphasize how interested he's in ruins, or that the buildings appears as ruinous. My, I mean, the number of people I've met who are from Munich, who are unaware that, that the Pinacotec was very badly damaged in the Second World War, and that the building you see now has, in some sense, very little to do with the Pinacotec of 1939, or before it was bombed in 43, 44, is astonishing, very, even art historians, I mean, architects, to some extent, but it's, it's, there's a real

1:01:30discretion in what he does. He never does the same thing. He really looks at the situation as found very carefully and does very bespoke responses. Not only does he not have a theory of reconstruction, he also genuinely is interested in the as found and whatever logic that has, then sees a great variety of possibilities and is relatively flexible in what he implements. And, and then I think the, yeah, I think it's the discretion of what he leaves as slightly ruinous or damaged, or how legible the repair becomes, so that

1:02:03you can see the repair, but it's not to do with strong contrasts, which you find in Schwarz and Bartning and other architects, or Egon Eiermann. It's like, you know, there's the damaged ruin, and here's the modern, with modern construction techniques, and modern ideas, and space, and so on, so forth. And the two kind of sit in this, this strange juxtaposition. He doesn't juxtapose. He patches, and, and sometimes he conceals the repair, and sometimes he makes it more visible. You can, you can always tell when you look carefully, but it does to take very careful. And it weirdly doesn't, it still

1:02:38has a certain heitakite, and he resisted the, the sort of sense that he was making ruins, or maintaining ruins, or, or, or, he knew of the attraction of the ruin. But actually, that too, he keeps at a certain bay, because he's, he knows of himself, he's too drawn to it. And he thinks it's almost immoral of an architect to simply celebrate the ruinous. He says he calls it pitiless. Hmm. So, so that, that, that I find fascinating that, that he sort of, you know, the, probably, I mean, as the Alte Pinakothek is his most famous building. And, you know, another well-known reconstruction is

1:03:16the repair of the Alte Südfried of the old southern cemetery, just south of, of, of the old city in Munich, you know, several kilometers south of the Alte Pinakothek. And that, I think very, very few people are aware that it's a reconstruction or a repair, or that it's either post-war or pre-war, it's, it's sort of indeterminate in age, and works very well as a kind of civic memorial garden without actually formally being a memorial. So he never builds memorials. I mean, there's one project I found, or two, where he, he, he plans a memorial unexecuted. But even those are almost questioning

1:03:52whether they should be there at all. So there's, there's a sort of, so, you know, I think one thing that has thrown people off Delgast and his writings are taking his writing seriously. So I, I claim that this is at least in English, the first book that looks at the writing seriously and takes him seriously as a thinker, and tries to bring the writing into play in interpreting his architecture, is that he doesn't talk about memory. He talks about tradition and history and, and culture and literature and the everyday and things in his personal life. And, you know, famously,

1:04:25Lawrence Stern was one of his favorite writers. And there's a Stern-like quality to, to the cryptic, the anecdotal, the never talking about, you know, digressing endlessly, saying a lot, but never that which you expect the author to write about, never explicitly addressing the topic. And so people wanted to find thoughtful commentary about memory and, and wounds and scars and how one works with them. And none of it is there. And then people have sort of looked at it once and sort of set it aside. And I found myself having to read and reread and reread. And every time I read the books again,

1:05:00they're short, long essays, you might say, you find another layer. But it's lovely that, that again, the, there's that sense of implementing ideas. It's just that if he brings these things into play, as motifs and themes, and then fundamentally, there's an ambiguity, you know, given his sort of, that he's tarnished by his activities in the 1930s and 40s, that he didn't, he never sort of, you know, he didn't, he didn't resist Nazism, certainly. He was opportunistic, he embraced aspects of it.

1:05:31And after the war, like the overwhelming majority of Germans, he did not address questions of guilt or responsibility, or even accepting that architecture is political. But he sort of, he even, you know, he sort of raises it and alludes to it, you know, every now and then. So he does bring it into play. And then fundamentally, it's ambiguous, but sort of, in its unfinished and provisional state, it has this kind of capacity to be meaningful to different generations from different perspectives, because it doesn't, in a way, impose a particular meaning or commemorative value. He doesn't really

1:06:05generate an iconography of reconstruction and, and, and, and, and memory or commemoration. And it's in that very provisional, unfinished, and ambiguous state, it allows itself, I think, to be incorporated. And I don't think that's a particularly moral stance he took, you can't credit him for an ethics of that, but you can sort of credit him for a cultural imagination. Yeah, that, that, you know, leads to that kind of sensitivity.

1:06:35For architects working today, whether it's in retrofit, conservation, heritage, reworking,

Lessons from a architectural dinosaur

1:06:42or even in more troubled environments, in post-conflict, post-war scenarios, what might Doolgath be able to teach us now? Yeah, I've thought about this, you know, writing the book, you know, you, you, you know, I'm an architectural teacher, I think about what, what, what I might convey about my research to, to students today. And I think there are lots of relevant things. I mean, on the one hand, he seems to belong to another world. You know, we've discussed how much of his kind of culture and education was indebted to, to a sort of the 19th century on some level, you know, the world

1:07:15that, that then kind of collapsed in the first world war and then, you know, collapsed several times over. So he does seem to be a, you know, dinosaur on some level. On the other hand, if you look at kind of what he does and, and the sort of range of his responses to, to crises, I think he's, he's rather interesting and relevant and potentially inspiring. And, you know, when I've had the chance to, to bring him into play in seminars or lectures, I found students now sort of surprisingly receptive. I mean, I think there are, I mean, it's interesting, how do you speak about an architect and, and whatever

1:07:49lessons you might draw from who, who refused to develop theories, who, who never established clear principles and someone who, you know, it's easier to define what, what he is not than to, to define what he is. But that very kind of elusiveness, I think is kind of makes him relevant and fresh because, you know, each generation or different kinds of architects can kind of draw something different. I think there's definitely a really healthy sort of skepticism in Dergast at a time when, you know, ideological or dogmatic extremes, he, he tended to be, you know, skeptical and,

1:08:24you know, open, curious, pluralist, but, but never aligned himself with a particular kind of school of thought. And I think there's a lot of emphasis on, on ethics and, and the greater good in architectural education and, and architectural criticism. But I think often there's still this kind of need for an architect to take a very strong position to make strong pronouncements and, and sort of lay a claim to a side guys, you know, the spirit of the time and, and make a strong argument about the future. And I think to almost have the courage to embrace the provisional and, and acknowledge,

1:08:58you know, that, that you work in this sort of imperfect world and that your practical imagination can make a very significant contribution. Um, and you, you can actually, you know, you can get, get your hands dirty, you know, you can, you can, you can achieve quite remarkable things at times of crises, scarcity, and even moral bankruptcy. I mean, that, that's the world that Dergast was working in. And, and, you know, he, he was honest with himself. He didn't have a, a clear conscience, like almost no German had.

1:09:29Um, and yet, you know, without laying claims to building some heroic post-war world, he did a huge amount for his city. And I think there is a kind of, there's something to be said for, you know, working in, in a context that you're familiar with, uh, making a contribution locally, regionally. I mean, he, he, his education was broad, his outlook was very broad, you know, he, he was open-minded about, you know, distant, artificial periods, but, but very aware of his kind of the, the cultural scene

1:10:00around him and contemporary art and culture. But, um, but that there was a richness to his work in Munich because he, he lived there, he taught there, he contributed, he was, he, he engaged with local communities, uh, in his projects. He, he, he loved his craftspeople. It was really moving account by, by someone who, who still remembers him toward the end of his life, who helped organize the exhibition and the faculty in the school of architecture in Munich. And they did the exhibition

1:10:30and the usual suspects arrived, you know, the professors, students, some people from the press and so on. And then a whole series of old men, you know, these old Bavarian gentlemen came and nobody had seen them before. And it's like, who are these guys? And it turned out that they were the carpenters and the masons and the Smiths and people had enormous respect for, for Dergast because he had enormous respect for them and, and always acknowledged the sort of, you know, left room for that, for their contribution and creativity as well. So I think that that sort of, yeah, skepticism

1:11:02of dogmatism, uh, you know, at the same time, no, no fear of, of getting involved, um, and, uh, uh, and sort of collaboration, I guess. And at the same time, you know, I think I sort of, he had this deep humanist culture and I think he drew on it and he, and he always said, you know, look, be independent, don't believe what your teachers tell you necessarily. Um, you know, look for inspiration elsewhere, you know, go to philosophy, go to literature, go, you know, listen to concerts,

1:11:35you know, so any, anything you, you can, and he did say, you know, take an interest in, in local heritage and understand your, your kind of local regional environment. There's, there's a lot, there are treasures there to, to, to, to, to be had, but, um, but, you know, you'll be a better architect for being open-minded and, and so on. And I think it's great, you know, read, think, write if you have an opportunity, you know, get involved in teaching, all of these things contributed to his quality. And I think I'm, I'm, I'm sort of struck that he, he also, not only did he, was he happy to,

1:12:07you know, work with these minimal means and salvage, you know, a structure, a ruin that few people thought valuable, you know, found direct and simple ways of, of making them good again, without claiming that this would be some sort of lasting symbol of, of the times. I mean, he, he, he constantly iterated his own projects. I mean, he would not, he never saw whatever he did and, and, and offered as somehow final. I mean, I think he would have been, you know, he wanted his own projects to be cared for, but I don't think he, I think he would have been quite bemused if any of his work, you know, would have, um, been listed,

1:12:42for instance, and, and even buildings he had built in the thirties that were war damaged. He never faithfully reconstructed, you know, nor did he say, right, that was an old world and now we must sweep it away and build something completely afresh. But, but he, he definitely saw it as an opportunity to have another go and he relished that, that chance to just come up with a different solution. So I think that that's quite moving that he didn't, not only did he sort of extend the life of, of found buildings, but, but he, he, he allowed his own buildings to have a life and to be changed

1:13:14and altered by himself or, or others. I think that that's quite, and then at this, by the same token, some of the things he, he, he saved, particularly the cemeteries. And although he did that with minimal means and seemingly in a provisional manner, always leaving open the door to further restorations or more faithful restoration, potentially they've become rather lasting contributions, but you don't necessarily make a contribution by being, you know, very bold in your narrative and wanting to, to, you know, build something for the future. You can build something for the

1:13:46now, and that might have a, a long afterlife, right? I think that that's almost liberating, perhaps an architect today to think, okay, you know, you can't be asked to solve crises, but your practical imagination can, can, can, can, you know, make a significant difference to a community, to the heritage of a city, you know, to solving practical problems. Like, you know, people need cemeteries, they need churches. And then I guess, finally, that he, he didn't seem to have the strong sense of it's all about the city, or it's all about the rural. And these are two

1:14:17different worlds. I think we have this tendency, everybody likes talking about cities. And then there's been a sense we've overdone the city, that we must go back to the rural. And where's, where, where are we currently at? And, you know, and in fact, he thought that that was a completely false dichotomy. And he kind of practiced urbanism, even in small villages that were really, you know, very much in the deep Bavarian countryside, which has a very strong rural culture. And any project he did, well, of whatever scale, in a way, he always approached it as a, as an urban problem,

1:14:49too. And I think that that the combination of the humanism with his commitment to urbanism, that I think is a good, that's still a pretty relevant recipe, I would say. I love this idea of embracing the provisional. I think that's a beautiful phrase. And I think that's a wonderful point to finish on. Max, thank you so very much for speaking with me. Thank you. It's been a pleasure.

Rooms inside the head

1:15:09Perhaps being old is having lighted rooms inside your head and people in them acting. People you know it can't quite name. Each looms like a deep loss restored from known doors turning, setting down a lamp, smiling from a stair, extracting a known book from the shelves. Or sometimes only the rooms themselves, the chairs and a fire burning, the blown bush at the window. Or the sun's faint friendliness on the wall, some lonely, rain-ceased midsummer evening. That is where they live, not here and now, but where all happened once. Miserablest Philip Larkin, doing his thing in his poem, The Old Fools.

1:15:41Something like dog-assed in words, I reckon. See the podcast description for links to Max at work and to the book. Max isn't on social media, another act of quiet resistance. There'll be links there also to ways of helping pay for this wee podcast project, if you fancy. And thanks for listening.