On the occasion of the opening of the exhibition UMBAU. Nonstop Transformation on March 4, 2024 at the AIT-ArchitekturSalon in Hamburg Repair, convert, build on, build up—the history of construction and architecture has featured these strategies since biblical times. Construction has always involved a constant metamorphosis from the old to the new. After the catastrophe of the Second World War, I also experienced what my generation accepted as daily life on the smallest scale: darning socks, wearing the hand-me-downs of my older siblings, resoling shoes, cutting up uniforms to make jackets and pants, repairing everything the household had that was still usable.
This small scale was replicated on a larger scale. The cities were destroyed, but the old foundations and ruins were suitable for building. Old bricks and stones were broken off and used for reconstruction. These were the days of the Trümmerfrauen (women who cleared away the rubble) who shaped the cityscape. It was a time of adversity and shortages of everything, unlike our hedonistic welfare society with its surplus of goods, obsessed with consumption, living only for today. Back then, doing without non-essential comforts and being willing to work together in solidarity were a matter of course and based on confidence in the future.
In the aftermath of that disastrous war, the words of Friedrich Schiller became the motto of the 1950s as a description of the incredible reconstruction of our devastated cities: “The old crumbling down—the times are changing— And from the ruins blooms a fairer life.”
Despite all the adversity and material shortages of those days, repair, conversion, and continuation were integral to all efforts to establish cultural continuity as the ground - work for a better future. It was all about retaining our cultural heritage, true to the maxim of the philosopher and peace researcher Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker: “Tradition is preserved progress, progress is continued tradition.” For the sake of future cultural progress, repair, conversion, and continuation demand not only the use of existing materials, but also the perpetuation of traditional cultural achievements of the past, which means that we need to perpetuate the established building culture.
Building in existing contexts can’t be solely a matter of technological necessities, of economizing on materials, and of climatic requirements. It must also be seen as an aesthetic challenge to create architectural and urban culture.
More than ten years ago, building in existing contexts was already the topic of an exhibition we held at the Fagus Factory in Alfeld, Germany, which was designed by Walter Gropius in 1911. The exhibition was called On Old Foundations because Gropius built new buildings on old foundations. The goal was to gain World Cultural Heritage status for the Fagus Factory as a historic artifact of new construction in an old context—an effort that was also successful. We also presented this exhibition at the Biennale in Venice in 2014.
Nearly ten years later, at last year’s Venice Biennale, we strongly reiterated the call for high-quality architectural design in conversion, extension, and continuation projects under the title UMBAU. Nonstop Transformation, because we saw the danger of neglecting the essential aesthetic of architectural and social quality when faced with increasingly urgent demands for more climate-compatible, economical, and ecologically considerate construction methods.
Architecture has never been an art without limits—and today it is less so than ever. It is and remains an art dependent on commissions that has to be justified to society.
As art forms, architecture and urban design are interfaces between the innumerable requirements of various disciplines: ecological sensitivity, reduced energy consumption, economical feasibility, functional utility, legal certainty, social compatibility—and, absolutely essential, aesthetic beauty. Architects have to dance in the chains of these practical constraints and society expects them to dance beautifully. The result should be a synthesis of elegant balance in beauty.
Today, the aesthetic of beauty has become conceptually entangled in a dubious intellectual dispute. Many people think that beauty can no longer be conclusively defined. All we needed was to hold tightly to the established definition, such as that of the church father Thomas Aquinas, who defined the traditional Platonic triad of truth, good - ness, and beauty as follows: When truth, meaning the rationally coherent, and goodness, meaning the emotional offering of human goodness, are combined in a synergy, beauty shines.
Ultimately, beauty is always determined ethically, defined by Immanuel Kant as an interested, rational appreciation. Today more than ever, rational truthfulness demands an end to the excessive plundering of our Earth, to its progressive poisoning, and to the destruction of its climate.
Meanwhile, the naive faith in progress that characterized the 19th and 20th centuries, and the widespread belief in harmless plund for the sake of supposedly necessary growth, have given way to our certainty about their catastrophic consequences.
After the Club of Rome warned of the Limits to Growth in 1972, it took society more than fifty years—an incredibly long time, spanning two generations—to not only appreciate the consequences of the ongoing plundering and squandering of our planet’s resources, but also to fight against it politically.
I remember the continuous warning cries of the CDU politician and subsequent cofounder of the Green Party, Herbert Gruhl, in his book Ein Planet wird geplündert: eine Schreckensbilanz unserer Politik (A planet is plundered: The balance of terror of our politic) published in 1975, which at the time fell on deaf ears. Thank goodness times have changed.
This unavoidable and necessary change in thinking takes us architects and urban planners back to the self-evident virtues of earlier generations: to the heritable building right, and to sustainability values in forestry that are based on an average tree growth of at least one-hundred years. (The 5-year depreciation period for cars, 15 years for seagoing vessels, and 30 years for real estate are the ludicrous products of a growth mania that fuels pointless consumption and sabotages sustainability.) This also applies to the conversions of our beloved, growing European cities that are designed to serve multiple generations.
By repairing, maintaining, adapting, converting, and extending, we save resources, conserve gray energy, and reduce building debris. This is good, and even better if it also succeeds in being beautiful.
Since 1965, our architectural practice has been converting buildings in cities around the world. In fifty years, we’ve gained experience from more than forty completed conversions of all types, always taking care not only to up- date the material and cultural quality of the existing buildings for their new and expanded use, but also to maintain the genius loci as an established tradition and the quality of the architectural design as defined by Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker as a fertile interaction between tradition and progress. For us, this dance in chains—and especially in the chains of the constraints of conversion and the structural context—has … been a stimulating challenge. It’s more interesting than constructing a new building on a tabula rasa. The conversion and continuation of existing buildings requires a more flexible imagination and more spontaneous creativity, as well as more respect for the existing historic and aesthetic quality to be perpetuated, and especially for the genius loci.
We began our conversions in the 1970s, in the Altona district of our home city of Hamburg, with the transformation of the Fabrik, an old munitions factory in the cultural center that is still vibrant today. The reconstruction took place after a fire. The interior was fitted out with demolition mate - rials from the Hanseviertel, as all wooden construction for the hall building—and with a crane rescued from the demolished Menck & Hambrock excavator factory, to serve as a landmark.
We then rescued Karl Schneider’s Michaelsen Country House in Falkenstein, converted the Museum of Hamburg History, converted a barracks to make it the main building of the Technical University in Hamburg, converted the Springer Quarter, and transformed the urban block on Alter Wall into a lively city center. All were historic monuments.
Then came the Olympic Stadium in Berlin, the National Museum in Beijing, conversion of Pier Luigi Nervi’s historic monument Manifattura Tabacchi in Bologna into a research center, Dresden’s Kulturpalast from the GDR era, the Pressehaus am Alexanderplatz in Berlin, engineer Ulrich Müther’s Hyparschale in Magdeburg, and the Civic Center by Johannes Göderitz in Magdeburg—also historic monuments.
Conversions have recently become a phenomenon in Shanghai as well, instead of just new construction. Having won a competition, we’re turning an 860-meter-long stainless steel factory into an Academy of Fine Arts.
And last but not least, the Alsterschwimmhalle in Hamburg has just been completed. As Germany’s largest shell building from the 1960s, it is also listed as a historic monument. It was developed by the engineer Jörg Schlaich, who is also responsible for many other striking feats of engineering in Hamburg, including the television tower, the glass roof covering the courtyard of the Museum of Hamburg History, the crescent roof over the ZOB, and the membrane roof of the velodrom in the Stellingen district.
Architecture is always a group effort. The four conversions featured in the Hamburg exhibition were the work of teams headed by our Partners Stephan Schütz and Christian Hellmund in Berlin (Isarphilharmonie in Munich), our Partners Magdalene Weiss in Shanghai (Academy of Fine Arts in Shanghai), Nikolaus Goetze and Jan Blasko in Hamburg (Columbus Cruise Terminal in Bremerhaven), and Marc Ziemons (Alsterschwimmhalle in Hamburg).
In 1965, together with Meinhard von Gerkan, Volkwin Marg founded gmp · von Gerkan, Marg and Partners Architects. From 1979 to 1984, Marg was President of the Association of German Architects (BDA), and from 1986 to 2003 he held the Chair of Urban Design and Material Studies at the Faculty for Architecture at Aachen Technical University. In 2012, Hamburg’s HafenCity University awarded him an honorary doctorate. Marg is cofounder of the gmp Foundation and the Academy for Architectural Culture (aac) for the advancement of young architects, and he has received numerous awards, such as the Fritz Schumacher Prize, the Grand Award of the Association of German Architects, and the Federal Cross of Merit, 1st class. Marg’s best-known buildings include the New Leipzig Trade Fair, the refurbished and reroofed Olympic Stadium in Berlin, and the stadiums in Cape Town, Durban, Port Elizabeth, Brasília, Manaus, and Belo Horizonte for the FIFA World Cups in South Africa and Brazil.