As soon as the rebuilt Berlin Palace is firmly anchored in the consciousness of the capital, the debate revolves around the next reconstruction project: It is about Karl Friedrich Schinkel’s building academy, which once stood opposite the main portal of the Berlin Palace on the other side of the Spree Canal.
Schinkel’s late work is particularly valued by architects because the serial facades of the brick cube pointed the way to rationalist modernism. The building academy came through the Second World War unscathed, the GDR had already started with the reconstruction – then it was demolished for the new building of the GDR foreign ministry. Since its demolition in 1995, the building site has been free again, and a sample corner reconstructed true to the original on site gives a good impression of the delicacy and noblesse of the former facades.
While Berlin’s Senate Building Director Petra Kahlfeldt wants to ensure that the cube is reconstructed to be true to the original, the founding director of the Bundesstiftung Bauakademie, Guido Spars, wants the reconstruction to become “an outstanding example of the innovative power and ecological, economic and social sustainability in the building industry”. He prefers a “contemporary interpretation” of the historic building.
In this context, it is revealing how one of the most famous architects of modernism, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, thought about the reconstruction of another striking building by Karl Friedrich Schinkel: the “Elisenbrunnen” in Mies’ birthplace Aachen.
Mies had gone to Berlin at the age of 19, became the last director of the Bauhaus before the Nazis closed it down, moved to Chicago and became one of the most famous exponents of the rationalist International Style. Since his time in Berlin, however, Mies was also an admirer of Karl Friedrich Schinkel.
His Elisenbrunnen in Aachen from 1827, a Doric pump room named after the Prussian Crown Princess Elisabeth Ludovika of Bavaria, was almost completely destroyed in the Second World War. The first competition for reconstruction was announced in 1948. The participants were given the choice of reconstructing the Elisenbrunnen or preferring a contemporary version.
68 designs were submitted, 17 of which showed the historical shape. The drafts were presented to the public, and interest was great, as it was a building that shaped the cityscape and stood for the spa town of Aachen like no other.
The jury, chaired by the renowned architect Emil Fahrenkamp, decided that no design met the high standards, no first prize was awarded, and second prize went to a modern design by Michael Fleischer. This vote caused a heated debate, also in the letters to the editor columns of the local newspapers. As Julie Rosskamp writes in the book “Aachen nach 1945”, “the majority of the Aachen population decided to have the building rebuilt”.
At the time, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe was visiting his hometown. He was asked by students what he would design on the site of the destroyed Elisenbrunnen. Thomas Ch. Haendly, who worked at the Aachen planning office at the time, remembers his answer in the book “Unbuilt Aachen”. “Much to the dismay of the students,” Mies replied: “If the Elisenbrunnen is a landmark of the city, and I have no doubt about it, then it should be rebuilt the way it was.”
And that’s how it finally happened. In 1951, a second competition was announced, in which only two architects from the Aachen Building Department were commissioned to look for a suitable design to solve the “Elisenbrunnen problem”. Finally, the city decided in favor of the design of the Oberbaurat Kerz, which envisaged the reconstruction.
At that time, the building authorities had hardly any historical plans available for the reconstruction. Therefore, one oriented oneself to photos, engravings and preserved fragments. At the reopening on November 9, 1953, Lord Mayor Hermann Heusch said in his speech: “Of the many monuments in Aachen that were destroyed by the bombs during the last war, apart from the town hall, none had such a secure place in the hearts of the entire population as Schinkel’s designed landmark of Bad Aachen, the Elisenbrunnen.”
Ludwig Mies van der Rohe died in Chicago in 1969. Little did he know that 15 years later one of his masterpieces would be reconstructed true to the original: his German Pavilion for the 1929 World Exhibition in Barcelona. After the end of the Expo, the building was dismantled into its individual parts and sold. For decades, only photographs and a few sketches reminded us of this highly elegant design.
On the initiative of Spanish architects, the Barcelona Pavilion was reconstructed in the mid-1980s – not as a “contemporary interpretation”, mind you, but true to the original. Exactly what Mies van der Rohe once wanted for Schinkel’s Elisenbrunnen in his hometown of Aachen.