Even the Architect Thinks Germany’s Chancellery Is Too Big

The sprawling federal chancellery nearing completion beside the Spree River is an outsize architectural achievement that this city’s cognoscenti either hate to love or love to hate.

Even the architect who designed the latest star on Berlin’s ever-changing skyline concedes that the project suffers from its gargantuan scale.

“The core building is too big, but Helmut Kohl wanted it that way,” says Axel Schultes, the 57-year-old Berliner who fought the former chancellor’s demands for an even taller building. He also lost a battle to balance the behemoth with an adjacent public arena like the Roman Forum to give it a more populist feel.

Clearly worried that the building might be seen as intimidating, Schultes notes that the 205,000 square feet of work space within the alabaster and sea-green structure is the same as that of the old government headquarters in Bonn, long regarded as a model of architectural modesty in the post-World War II era.

But the towering 119-foot-tall central block of the new government headquarters--which is as tall as the Reichstag building, the seat of Germany’s Parliament, farther east along the Spree--gives the chancellery its imposing character and is expected to invite criticism that the colossus sends an aggressive message about reunified Germany to the outside world.

So hardly anyone aligned with the government of Social Democratic Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder, whose defeat of Kohl in 1998 came too late to rein in the project, wants to admit publicly to liking the orphaned structure.

“There is a definite tendency throughout the government to keep a distance from the building, to say it was Kohl’s thing,” Schultes observes as he nevertheless proudly shows off his monumental achievement.

Schroeder has shown little enthusiasm for his new office and living quarters, having commented at the ceremonial roofing completion in April 1999 that “it certainly could have been a tad smaller.” No one from his office would discuss the impending move, but advisors say confidentially that Schroeder is eager to get into the new headquarters, which will allow all 500 of his staff to be under one roof for the first time since he took office 27 months ago.

Chancellery officials who took over from Kohl’s staff in 1998 were divided between here and Bonn until the official shift of the capital to Berlin in summer 1999. Since then, less than half of the chancellor’s staff and aides have been able to cram into the provisional headquarters, the old East German State Council Chamber.

With the project already more than a year behind schedule, Schultes says he is being pressured to meet an April 2 deadline for having the chancellery ready for occupation. He says June would be more realistic.

Despite its ambitious dimensions, the chancellery has received mostly positive, if murmured, reviews from the city’s architectural and historical mavens.

“I like it very much, although its size makes it too imposing,” says Peter Conradi, president of the Federal Chamber of Architects and a member of the jury that decided eight years ago on a master plan for developing Berlin’s new government district. He sees the model, which envisions a mile-long line of parks, Parliament and executive buildings twice crossing the Spree, as a symbolic unification of city precincts divided during the Cold War by the Berlin Wall. Conradi likens the site to the Mall in Washington linking the Capitol and monuments.

Berlin historian Wolf Jobst Siedler is also a quiet admirer of the new chancellery--except for the size, for which he and others are pleased to have Kohl to blame.

“From an architectural standpoint, it’s a very interesting and innovative building, but I find all of the new government structures too massive,” Siedler says. “Still, I don’t think it’s fair to say it gives the wrong impression or should be seen as any kind of aggressive expression.”

Leftists within the former East German Communist Party, now called the Party of Democratic Socialism, have been the most critical of the new government headquarters, largely because Schultes beat out a team of young East Berlin architects for the privilege of designing the structure. Kohl was keen to award the project to the easterners as a gesture of reconciliation, but those on the architectural jury thought that the competing design was too reminiscent of the palace proposed though never built by Third Reich architect Albert Speer for Adolf Hitler.

Instead, the Schultes proposal was approved in 1994 and expanded at the insistence of the former chancellor so that his headquarters would dominate the official skyline.

“This is a memorial to Helmut Kohl,” says Heinrich Wefing, architecture critic for the influential daily Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. “Kohl wanted the chancellery to be the biggest building in the government quarter. He wanted it to become the backdrop for TV cameras that every viewer immediately recognized as Germany, Berlin, the capital, what’s important.”

Wefing also expresses mild admiration for the resulting structure for its extensive use of natural light and incorporation of green space.

The top three floors of the main building house a small private apartment for the chancellor and his spacious corner office, both with commanding southeast views over the Berlin skyline and bulletproof glass in the broad, arched windows. Work space for his top advisors and the Cabinet meeting room also are in the upper level. The lower floors accommodate reception areas and an international conference room capable of seating 150, large enough to host summits such as the annual gathering of the Group of Seven industrialized nations. Two wings extending 1,100 feet westward will be occupied by chancellery employees.

Like many of the structures designed for the government district--an arc of flat territory carved out by the Spree--the chancellery was supposed to have been completed at the time the capital was moved. It was the first of several major constructions to be completed. A renovation of the century-old Reichstag was one of the few capital building projects finished ahead of the relocation.

However, the chancellery project is sticking to one limit: the $224-million ceiling on costs imposed after several budget overruns since design approval.

The chancellery might seem less out of proportion, the observers say, once other buildings in the government district are completed. The central train station just north across the Spree will be nearly as big. Three eight-story office buildings also will provide some context for the chancellery, which currently is flanked by nothing higher than single-story construction containers.

“When everything else is ready, the chancellery may seem less gigantic,” Wefing says. “For the time being, though, people are comparing it to [late Romanian dictator Nicolae] Ceausescu’s House of the Republic, although it is nowhere near that size.”