Will the “New Bauhaus” of Green Architecture Look Like This?
To slow climate change, we’ll need to rethink our buildings
and cities. And that’ll usher in a new aesthetic.
By Andreas Kluth
February 27, 2021, 1:00 AM EST
The look of the Green era? Source: Mad Arkitekter/UTB
projektmanagement GmBH
It’s not often that the European Commission, a sprawling
bureaucracy housed in an ugly building, triggers my aesthetic imagination. But
it happened last year, when President Ursula von der Leyen declared that she
wanted to bring into life a “new European Bauhaus.”
What, I began wondering, might this look like? I think I’ve
now had a first glimpse.
Von der Leyen meant the phrase as a catchy shorthand for a
wholesale cultural change to accompany her biggest goal: making the European
Union climate neutral by 2050. This undertaking will require far more than
reforming our energy industry. It also means reimagining our buildings and
entire cities.
Inevitably, such changes will become associated with their
own aesthetic. So it was with all other movements in history. And among the
most famous — hence von der Leyen’s reference to it — was the original Bauhaus,
which was founded in Weimar in 1919 and thrived for 14 years until the Nazis
shut it down.
The Bauhaus was an interdisciplinary design school that
attracted architects and artists, craftspeople and carpenters, typographers and
ceramists. Guided by the principles that form should follow function and that
nothing should be wasted, they designed new stuff: chairs, lamps, type fonts,
buildings, you name it.
Many Bauhaus alumni became famous, from architects like
Walter Gropius or Mies van der Rohe to artists like Paul Klee or Wassily
Kandinski. After the Nazi takeover, they became a diaspora that carried their
stylistic vision across the world. If it’s hard to notice today, that’s because
it’s almost everywhere, from the streets of Tel Aviv to, yes, your local Ikea
store.
The word Bauhaus visually defined an entire era: modernism.
Sleek, simple and always functional, it stood aesthetically for a century of
industrialization and urbanization.
So what could Bauhaus 2.0 look like? Our era, if all goes
well, will hopefully not be one of de-industrialization, and certainly not one
of de-urbanization. But if it is to be “green,” it should at least reconcile
economic prosperity with a new ecological humanism.
As I listened to von der Leyen’s speech, my mind conjured an
imaginary cityscape that looked suspiciously like a Tolkienesque Shire, with
grass-covered Hobbit holes and such. That, I quickly realized, won’t scale and
won’t work.
What will work remains to be seen. Ideas are now being
dreamed up in the budding movement of the New European Bauhaus, at conferences
like this upcoming event organized by Future Architecture, a cross-disciplinary
network of artsy types. But one concrete expression — though its conception
predated von der Leyen’s labelling — could be a project just approved here in
Berlin (pictured above and below).
Called WoHo (for Wohnhochhaus, or “residential tower”),
it’ll be a skyscraper made of wood. In fact, it’ll be the tallest wooden tower
in Europe, with 29 stories rising 322 feet (98 meters).
This wood, of course, isn’t sticks or plywood. It’s
state-of-the-art “engineered timber,” whose layers are cross-laminated for each
purpose — beams, walls and so forth — so that it has almost the strength of steel but at a fraction of the weight.
Whereas cement and steel are, in terms of greenhouse-gas
emissions, among the dirtiest materials to produce, wood is the cleanest.
Making it — that is, letting trees grow — actually captures carbon dioxide from
the air. The timber in the buildings then stores this carbon practically
forever. So wood is sustainable and “green.” Obviously, we’ll need massive
reforestation to have enough of it around.
Wood also offers other delights. Running your hand over
wooden walls feels “more human” than touching cement or plaster, says Jonny
Klokk, one of the Norwegian architects who designed the WoHo. Wood, like
people, ages; it lives and tells stories. It has an aroma and radiates warmth.
In a word, Klokk told me, it’s koselig. That’s Norwegian for “cosy” — the
analog of the famous Danish hygge or the German gemuetlich.
relates to Will the “New Bauhaus” of Green Architecture Look Like This?
That new and koselig feeling.Source: Mad Arkitekter/UTB projektmanagement GmBH
The WoHo embodies the vision behind the New Bauhaus in more
ways than that. Thomas Bestgen, boss of UTB, the German developer behind the
project, told me that buildings should be sustainable not only ecologically but
also socially. They should help “mix” our cities — between rich and poor,
businesses and families, work and culture, and so forth.
The
WoHo will do a lot of mixing. It’ll have commercial and retail space,
owner-occupied units for the well-heeled and subsidized housing for the less
well-off. There’ll be apartments for families; studios for the young, hip and
single; housing for older people in nursing care and kindergartens for
toddlers.
The complex combines high-rise
and low-rise buildings, and lots of open and shared spaces. Why, Bestgen
asked me rhetorically, should every unit have its own washing machine?
Residents could instead do their laundry in communal areas, and trade some
gossip while folding.
The hope is that projects like this will rejuvenate entire
parts of Berlin. The area — I used to work just up the street — is centrally
located but depressing, like a lot of neighborhoods that were bombed out in
World War II, then forgotten in the shadow of the former Berlin Wall. But
nearby are parks and play areas, as well as the business and cultural life of
Potsdamer Platz, analogous to Times Square. All this will be walkable, bikeable
and scooterable. Sustainable all the way.
If we are to succeed in slowing global warming, we’ll need
to rethink our buildings, cities and societies. But we’ll only accept these
changes if things are also handsome. As Klokk told me, “The most environmental
thing you can do is to build a building so beautiful, nobody wants to tear it
down.”
It’ll take decades for a new and green aesthetic to develop.
But I’m hopeful now that it’ll be, shall we say, koselig.
This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the
editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.
To contact the author of this story:
Andreas Kluth at akluth1@bloomberg.net
To contact the editor responsible for this story:
Nicole Torres at ntorres51@bloomberg.net
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