EThere are journalists who manage to write about a house in such a way that you can imagine what it looks like and where its qualities or flaws lie. But then there are authors who, based on the house they write about, can explain an entire society with literary precision and a keen eye for details, fine shifts, small and large absurdities. One of these authors is Hermann Funke.
The architect, born in 1932, had studied architecture in Braunschweig in the 1950s and experienced the bright moments of the Federal Republic of Germany’s reconstruction years as well as its abysses and disasters. Since the 1960s, however, he has published texts on construction, especially in the “Zeit” and in the “Spiegel”, which left no one indifferent. Funke was one of the first to recognize the extent to which the built environment shapes life – and was also able to write about it. The features editor at the time, Rudolf Walter Leonhard, once wrote that Funke had “invented a new genre for German journalism: architectural criticism”.
These reviews from 1962 to 2003, which Funke wrote alongside his work as an architect, are now finally available in one volume. It can be read not only as a collection of architectural criticism, but as a history of post-war society in the Federal Republic of Germany, its dreams and traumata, its economic and ideological entanglements – whether it is about the terror of the open-plan office or that of the soulless dormitory towns, the linguistic fraud of the people of Hamburg ” City Nord”, which is an office ghetto, but not a “city” at all, or the luxury holiday homes in the sentimental peasant cottage style that the new business leaders are building on Sylt, where, like Marie Antoinette in the Hameau of Versailles, they reenact the simple life of those who actually exploit them.
Passionate, combative, often devastatingly funny
Funke roams through post-war Germany like a puzzled ethnologist exploring a strange planet and its strange inhabitants. In Hanover, in the castle park, where the parliament could have been built, a restaurant for the bourgeois taste of the eating wave years is to be built: pork knuckle and sauerkraut for the economic miracle workers instead of politics for everyone. The unctuous language of modern architects is perceived with subtle irony: “Whoever calls their study a studio can call it the atrium patio. Now we can have a say. Or should we do something unusual? Perhaps we should ask what it is that the discussion is passing by,” says one criticism.
As early as 1963 Funke wrote critically about “star architecture” and thus coined a term that only made an international career decades later. He writes passionately, combatively, often incredibly funny, always clairvoyantly; There is a subtle, philanthropic irony in his texts, a skepticism about grand ideologies, and a sharpness of argument reminiscent of the feuilletons of Kracauer and Tucholsky. Not everyone who caught Funke’s sharp gaze was impressed by what they had to read about themselves: The architect Hermann Henselmann wrote to Funke in 1965 that he “can imagine that many architects are annoyed by your criticism. I’ve spoken to several people who are downright snarling at you. . .”
#Hermann #Funkes #collected #architectural #criticism