A Dresdener with all my heart: Architect Peter Kulka dies

FGerman reunification was a great blessing for Peter Kulka. Born in Dresden in 1937, he suffered all his life from the trauma of seeing his hometown burn in a hail of bombs as a seven-year-old. After studying in East Berlin and briefly working for Hermann Henselmann, the free spirit fled the GDR in 1965 and worked for Henselmann's antipode Hans Scharoun in West Berlin. He founded his office in Cologne in 1979 and built university and religious buildings. From 1986 to 1992 he held the chair for structural design at RWTH Aachen University, where he was a charismatic teacher and influenced many of his future colleagues.

Black box with lifting floor in a classicist building

After the fall of the Wall, he immediately moved to Dresden, became involved in the new federal states and especially in his hometown, which was architecturally on the conservative, from his point of view, wrong path and dreamed of the restoration of baroque times. First, he won the competition to build the new Saxon state parliament. He used his knowledge advantage when the construction administration was still being set up and built the new plenary hall from 1991 to 1997, almost unhindered by authorities and regulations.

This was followed by a department store on Prager Strasse, the expansion of the Hygiene Museum, and his own studio and residential building on Weißeritzstrasse. With his combative manner and his uncompromisingly modern architectural language, he was not entirely well-liked in Dresden, but he had many colleagues at the universities and in the architectural community who rallied behind him.

The state parliament in Potsdam was his fall from grace, but it also showed that Kulka had become more capable of compromise in some nuances. Hasso Plattner and Günter Jauch had irreversibly set the course for the reconstruction of the Prussian city palace and created facts with the preliminary construction of the gate building. Kulka accepted, reconstructed the exterior of the building, but demonstrated inside what a consistently modern parliament should look like. One would have wished that the Berlin palace reconstructors in Potsdam had found out how to do something like this properly.

In 2001, Peter Kulka was commissioned to expand the former rehearsal room into a multifunctional hall in the Berlin Schauspielhaus, which had been reconstructed as a concert hall in the style of Schinkel. Columns and pilasters were not available from him. Nobody would suspect his black box with a full-surface lifting floor for contemporary performances in the classicist building.

Peter Kulka demonstrated how consistently modern, yet maximally sensitive and congenial Peter Kulka could deal with history, especially at the Dresden Royal Palace. The turnaround came at just the right time for the stately, magnificent building, which represented a model book of architectural history with its Gothic core, Renaissance and Baroque parts and finally its transformation in the nineteenth century. Because the Dresden monument conservators were busy inventing history, reconstructing the Renaissance courtyard as it never was, devising building sections that had disappeared two centuries ago and for which there are no reliable plans.

Suffering under today's construction circumstances

When no one could think of a solution to the tricky access system in the complex walls, Kulka cut the Gordian knot by vaulting the small castle courtyard with a glass dome and turning it into a common foyer from which all museums are accessible. He designed additional museum rooms, including the legendary Turkish Chamber and the Giant's Hall, and ensured that the desire to misrepresent history was silenced and that the 20th century continued to build on the residential palace as a matter of course, as it had done in all the centuries before.

Most recently, Peter Kulka, as always with heart and soul and positive energy, was planning the expansion of his Saxon state parliament. For him it was a fight against a lot of resistance. In his vehemently committed manner, he often complained about the difficult conditions under which one has to build today, the tough political decision-making processes, the jungle of authorities and the absurd regulations, and longed for the paradisiacal conditions shortly after the fall of communism. The project is now being continued by his adopted daughter Katrin Leers-Kulka. Peter Kulka died on Monday at the age of 86 in his Dresden apartment.