Our architecture firm has been dealing with the topic of sustainable construction for about thirty years now. At the beginning, we focused our attention clearly on questions of energy use. We sought to reduce the consumption of electricity, heat and cooling in our projects as much as possible, through the use of both passive and active measures, since we (rightly) had to assume that the energy used in those buildings would come from fossil fuels. Efforts like those were actually something new in 1990 but they spread fairly quickly, because energy consumption is directly reflected in hard cash, and it’s easy for building owners to understand the desirability of spending a little more money at the start of a project, knowing it will result in reduced running costs in the long term. At this point, I could tell you about the difficulties we had in actually achieving those calculated consumption targets, about weak technology, overly complicated interfaces, sloppy monitoring and, above all, also about unforeseen user behaviour – all phenomena that repeatedly called into question the whole well-intentioned undertaking. In addition, our savings targets were quickly surpassed by official legislation, and the level of energy consumption in buildings continued to fall due to consecutive generations of the EnEV [Energy Saving Ordinance]. This also had to do with the fact that it became increasingly feasible to utilise renewable energy in our buildings or supply them with combined heat and power [CHP] systems whose carbon footprints are effectively semi-neutral.

These shifts also changed the main focus of our thinking. For us, the turning point in this development came when we were asked to renovate an existing office building in Munich. It was an administration building for Siemens Nixdorf, built in the 1980s as an early data processing centre, that was to be turned into office space for insurance workers. In this case, the client was not keen on incorporating energy-saving measures beyond those required by the EnEV, but did agree to refurbish the existing building rather than demolish it. The structural work thus consisted of some minimal demolition work and, to a lesser extent, additional new construction in some places (but more in the sense of retrofitting the existing construction). In addition, however, the façades and all the mechanical systems as well as all the interior finishings were still replaced. The big “aha moment” came when we asked our consultants to calculate how much CO2 savings we could achieve by upcycling the building’s existing shell. The results really surprised us. Werner Sobek’s engineers calculated that if we retained the existing building’s structural frame instead of building new, the amounts of energy and CO2 we would save were equivalent to heating the entire building for 34 years. That is an impressive result, achieved essentially through targeted inaction. And if you add to this the fact that for new construction, any special measures taken for improved sustainability would also fall on the negative side of the energy balance, our particular commitment to reducing “red” operating energy is even more outweighed by considerations of the “grey” energy that lies dormant in the existing building materials. Here, too, we calculated a pronounced financial benefit compared to the alternative of a new building – which, however, was appreciably enhanced by the fact that our clients needed to relocate at a certain point in the future, and the recycling variant brought with it a considerable advantage in time.

Apart from that, the relationship between ecology and economy for a renovation is no longer so immediately comprehensible to a client in terms of money in the bank. There are however some clients who also have a sense of the bigger picture, and reinsurers are among them. For us as planners this was a key experience, and in connection with the theme of this convention, “Heritage – Presence – Future”, it would be interesting to ask what this experience means for our thinking and our planning priorities, provided that it’s also applicable to other situations.

For us, this implies a “mere” shift of attention towards grey energy, and thus we’ve most recently been focusing more on timber, as a carbon-negative building material, and have taken an interest in clay. We’re researching prefabrication techniques with a view towards their great advantages in terms of construction logistics, and we’re striving to use single-origin building elements and fasteners.

Above all, however, we’ve discovered a new appreciation for the existing physical substance of a building, especially in regards to those products used by previous generations from whom we might want to strongly differentiate ourselves for personal reasons.

There’s no reason to distance ourselves from earlier attempts to solve issues of energy consumption, even if they may seem overly optimistic in hindsight. On the contrary, efforts to reduce consumption have indeed been successful when one considers the speed with which building legislation has been revised in recent decades. However, in light of all the façades with external thermal insulation that are going up across the country, it’s also clear this chapter is not yet in any way over architecturally. One would hope that, alongside improved energy efficiency for buildings, we might also develop higher aesthetic values for the city and community.

Along with raising awareness about the life cycle of materials, we also need a greater willingness to innovate, a creative inventive talent, in order to take the often contradictory constraints of contemporary building technologies and systems, and from that, synthesise a unity that would make a positive contribution to the city.

This is especially so because the somewhat disappointing balance of “energy-efficiency retrofits” of old and new building projects paradoxically seems to support the arguments of those who fundamentally doubt progress, even among architects. This fear of the new that’s so rampant these days then leads to the idealisation of historical building practices and a cynical malice towards the creative work efforts of many current actors in our profession. Thus architects force themselves to take a defensive position, and merely demonstrate how they, too – especially when compared to predecessor generations – seem to have lost courage and passion for the future.

It’s no coincidence that in this context, the concept of Heimat [home/homeland] is suddenly experiencing a renaissance, also in connection with construction.  Even though our minister seems to have been busy since his inauguration with matters other than building, the renaming of the ministry alone sent a clear signal. What used to be the Bauministerium [Ministry of Construction] took a detour past transportation, the environment and reactor safety to now arrive as the Ministerium des Innern, für Bau und Heimat [Ministry of the Interior, Building and Community]. What does it mean when a ministry seeks to govern the Heimat in conjunction with construction? To be honest, it doesn’t bode well because the initiative comes from a corner of the political realm that seems lately to have been single-mindedly trying to gain votes by appealing to populism using the same political currency. And one suspects that here, “Heimat” is not a reference to a quasi-ideal place of longing that would render the concept as precious as it is unattainable, but rather to a fixed image meant to help distinguish between good and bad, right and wrong, German and non-German.

Heimat is the sum of “countless life stories, the battlefield of emotions,” says Edgar Reitz, the director of the splendid trilogy of television films titled Heimat. For his characters, Heimat is, on the one hand, a vague rootedness to the landscape (in this case, the Hunsrück mountains) that they carry with them throughout their lives, even when they emigrate to distant lands. On the other hand, this collective mental condition of Heimat can be shaken or altered by two kinds of personal development.

The first comes by way of the individual’s path through life, the fate each protagonist experiences, the people they meet, the milieus and landscapes (in the broadest sense) through which they travel. The second results from the inexorable changes to the place of birth itself that make the image of Heimat ever more distant and seemingly clouded. The yearning for rootedness, for belonging, is a basic need that likely grows increasingly disappointed the longer a person follows a life path in which this longing for anchoring goes unfulfilled. The greater the unrootedness, the greater the need for affirmation and compensation.

The built environment is seen by many as one such affirming and compensating phenomenon, and is thus exploited. It is indeed a question that we as practicing architects must address, namely to what extent the spaces we design and create are suitable for performing their service on this “battlefield of emotions”. Of course the equations “old equals good” and “new equals disconcerting” always apply in this context. But if we believe we can satisfy the need for Heimat by artificially recreating a “good” historical condition, we’re making it too easy for ourselves.

For even with the best conservation and restoration efforts, one cannot re-synthesise something old; and even if this were to succeed in the case of a single building or ensemble of buildings, the context in which these structures stand is also changing. And just as an old building has a different meaning for each generation and repeatedly has to be adapted to new requirements, a synthesised historical building in a contemporary context would suddenly be a foreign element.

We can observe that very clearly these days by looking at Frankfurt’s new old town: This ensemble of quasi-reconstructed buildings is less suited to creating a Heimat than any of the modern buildings in the neighbourhood because, first of all, its blatantly exclusive and symbolic character distances it from Frankfurt’s actual residents, and beyond that, the multitudes of tourists one finds there, many of them Asians, suggest that something fundamental about this supposed focal point of local identity and traditional urban life must have changed. The city has not been “given back its heart and soul”, as Frankfurt’s mayor speculated; instead, a simulacrum has been erected, an image that responds in the manner of a travel guide to the question of personal identity, and thus glosses over all doubts and unanswered questions – including, of course, the actual course of history. The longing for Heimat is not satisfied here, but sedated with simplistic answers and, in the worst case, instrumentalised in order to be able to divert fears of uprootedness in other directions.

A similar problem is emerging at the Humboldt Forum in Berlin. Here the opportunity of the century was wasted, the unique chance to refurbish the (quite usable) shell of the Palast der Republik following its decontamination. This “Centre Pompidou” of East Germany’s former capital could have been adapted without much difficulty for a new existence, and possibly expanded with new construction. The result would have also been good on a symbolic level, because a hybrid of recent – admittedly somewhat difficult – history and a new beginning would have pretty much corresponded rather closely to the situation we continue to find ourselves in today. The existing building’s grey energy and the cultural energy accumulated there should have been preserved and upcycled. Here, where the conflicting feelings of German identity come together, the battlefield could have been sublimated.

Instead, today we have a collage of historical backdrop and tedium that, at least as a building, is not really appealing for anyone to identify with. One can only hope that an excellent programme of exhibitions and events will soon help to overcome these flaws and establish a cultural presence. That many people can then link this place to aspects of that which they associate with their Heimat.

One has to wonder, of course, why Berlin’s Schloss and Frankfurt’s old town both seem to have so many enthusiastic supporters; whether one might be wrong in one’s own assessment. Of course I don’t at all want to exclude this option, but I would also like to offer another explanation: I suspect that these places are attractive not because they appeal to a deeply-felt sense of rootedness, but rather due to the sheer spectacle of such large, costly and exceptional projects. And, of course, the attention of the press does the rest. I fear that future generations will look at these phenomena with slight alienation, just as we might today take note of the excesses of Wilhelminism with detached incredulity.

Perhaps we need to accept that symbolic architecture is no more suitable as “Heimat material” than any other element we add to the built environment. Heimat emerges in the spaces of everyday life.

In this regard, the emotionally charged speech given in the Bundestag by Cem Özdemir on the occasion of Deniz Yücel’s release again came to mind. He addressed the members of the AfD party and others with the following words: “Your raging mob wanted to deport me on Ash Wednesday. That’s easier than you’d imagine: I’ll be back in my homeland next Saturday. I’ll fly to Stuttgart, then I’ll take the S-Bahn and I’ll get out at the last stop, Bad Urach. That’s where my Swabian Heimat is, and I won’t let you ruin it.” I take away two things from this moment, to which one should of course only conditionally attribute universality: There seem to be biographies with more than one Heimat. When Özdemir speaks of his Swabian Heimat, one suspects there might also be another one at the birthplace of his parents. And he wouldn’t be alone in that. Many earlier German states were already lands of immigrants before they even became part of modern Germany, and it stands to reason that for many Germans, the “battlefield of emotions” can be sought in several places. And if one now looks at Cem Özdemir for concrete indications of what constitutes his Swabian Heimat, it is interesting to begin with that in his off-the-cuff description (in addition to the basic democratic values of the state, which had already been explicitly mentioned in his speech), he first associates the German domestic flight to Stuttgart and the journey on the S-Bahn.

This leads one to suspect that everyday experiences are more likely what bring together people from different backgrounds. They form a common denominator that can give rise to a sense of community, which is ultimately so important for the success of our commonwealth. My hypothesis in this regard would thus be that the recurrent journey in the S-Bahn probably has more power to unite people than a visit to a reconstructed old town or a palace – that is, if we even agree that the built environment plays a part in that sense of Heimat and can embody the basic values of our society.

I must admit, I find the idea that Heimat and building somehow belong together to be very appealing. The realisation that the urban landscape of infrastructure, buildings, spaces and atmospheres influences people’s ideas and sensitivities just as decisively as the natural landscape of topography, fauna, flora and climate – I consider this realisation to be fundamental to understanding the importance and value of building in the world, and to acting accordingly. This realisation also helps us to understand that building should not be seen as a tool of demarcation and cultural reduction, but as a vehicle of openness, networking, tolerance and generosity, to the greatest extent possible.

Heimat emerges through identification, and identification through participation, through use and involvement. And for both, use and involvement, as well as for participation, architecture and construction offer ample space and opportunity. But the will to design does not by itself make a contribution to improvement. Commitment to the built environment must ultimately emanate from a common concern about the future if it’s also to contribute something to the Heimat of future generations, which takes us back to the beginning of my little speech. The greatest contribution we can currently make for future generations is to curb the excessive consumption of resources and combat the causes of climate change. And as we build, if we determine that performance optimisation is not enough, and that grey energy plays a significant role in the balance of a building’s life cycle, then we must use our creativity and innovative power to change our patterns of decision-making and behaviour – whether, for example, by using building materials with a smaller carbon footprint and/or by employing new building materials that offer better reusability.

Of course, the most environmentally friendly approach would be to forego new construction altogether, and that’s why a respectful approach to dealing with existing building material is just as much a part of this sustainability programme as is the adaptive reuse of existing buildings. The respect I refer to, however, is not just a technical obligation but above all also a cultural one. The longstanding battle cry of conservative colleagues, that “the city need not be reinvented” – which has generally resulted in the demolition of post-war modernist buildings and the erection of historic-looking new buildings in the service of the so-called European city – must be tempered. The city is not an end condition but a living organism that is constantly evolving. Each generation makes its contribution to this further development, and we would do well not to exhaust ourselves with ideological dogmatism, but to bundle all available energies and resources and to direct them in such a way that – using what is at hand – problems and tasks of the present are mastered and every chance for optimisation is exploited.

Of course, the preservation of existing material is an imperative, but with all due respect for accumulated life energy, many of these current challenges will not be overcome by doing nothing.

Ultimately, what we need is one invention or another that will lead to the new formation of certain aspects of the city. Here I name just a few factors, such as improving air quality, protecting water and soil from pollution, transitioning to clean energy, new forms of mobility, the impact of the digital infrastructure on public space, the need to densify cities and maintain an extensive green infrastructure, and the obvious changes in social relationships, as seen, for instance, in changes in how we work.

Moreover, our special task as designers is to make a continuous effort to preserve the built environment as a place that is sensually and aesthetically exciting and mentally stimulating. So many situations in our cities are simply dull, unloving, disconcerting and anything but inviting. To counter this entropy of the civil spirit with a persistent effort to maintain quality for the general public is our challenge, and will remain so in the future. This holds true especially in the face of the increasing systematisation of construction processes.

Nevertheless, the renovation, the respectful adaptive reuse of what already exists, and the sensible use of existing energies are good models and suitable metaphors for dealing with the built environment as a whole. People’s engagement with this renovation will, in the process, elicit an emotional bond and identification. It’s the quality of places of everyday inhabitation that will shape the image of Heimat of future generations.

Ultimately, Heimat can only be something that is indeed really close to people; Heimat cannot be simulated; Heimat is personal but must also be shared. Heimat may in principle be more associated with the immobile, making it the counterpart to the complex social dynamics that confuse people. But nonetheless, Heimat cannot be limited to things that last. It is especially the preservation of our shared values that often requires the adaptation of existing situations to new contexts.

The care of our Heimat requires continual attention, a sensitive spirit of invention, wisdom and openness.

 

Lecture given at the 2018 Baukultur Convention in Potsdam, convened under the title “Heritage – Presence – Future” by the Federal Foundation of Baukultur (BSBK).