Legal / Illegal Architecture
Building a small building in a southern suburb of Cologne.

(Project description of the building "legal / illegal", 2003)

Bayenthal is a suburb in discontent.

To examine and diagnose a psychosis of a suburb means working on the symptoms. These symptoms become apparent via the built environment, as well as on the Non-built; they are made visible in the scale of the urban and the city fabric as well as on the scale of a building; and they are written into the local code and the rules and regulations governing the development of that suburb. Bayenthal is a suburb in discontent. Located south of the medieval border of Cologne, it was founded in the middle of the nineteenth century and was incorporated into the district of Cologne in 80s of that same century in the wake of a large municipal reform. The founding of Bayenthal and its primary source of development goes back to its first discontent, a very productive „industrial discontent.“
While in England the steel was boiling, the furnaces were smoking, the turbines where hammering and hissing and the inferno was brought to the surface from deep inside the earth, it was still very serene in Prussia. Germany was a third-world country in the global steel-market, extremely inefficient and inexperienced in the newest technology. Gustav Mevissen, a developer and financial speculator from Cologne, was about to change this. He founded the „Kölner Maschinenbau AG“ (the Cologne Machine Construction Company Ltd.) in 1856 which was to build up and construct a factory with newest technology and production techniques on a generous site outside of the city limits of Cologne. The members of the board of supervisors were all heads of the main Cologne families, families which are still shaping the city today, like Oppenheim, vom Rath or Rautenstrauch. These very influential families secured the financing, which was enormous for that time and managed to construct the factory on a huge site of 18.000m2 in no time, and proving that the stock company as a financing instrument was the right tool to use. Profiting from the very strategic location at the river Rhine and from the „business angles“ in the board of supervisors, the company grew very quickly to be the major player in the steel market of Germany. It was able to secure many prestige projects like a number of bridges over the Rhine, the roof construction of both the Cologne Cathedral for its completion in the 80s of the nineteenth century and the overpowering „cathedral of technology“, the main trainstation, as well as the Cologne Flora - the inhouse botanical gardens - which, having the London Crystal Palace as its model, came surprisingly close to its size and grandeur, this also being a development out of envy and discontent. The factory which obviously went through many highs and lows in its more than hundred years of existence has shaped the suburb of Bayenthal and its urban fabric enormously.

Discontent Citizens

Bayenthal was inhabited by a very clearly segregated two-class system, on the one hand the leading engineers and accountants of the factory and on the other hand the workers. The owners of the factory lived „across the road“ in the adjacent villa - gardencity suburb of Marienburg. The miserable living and working conditions produced the second kind of discontent: the „architectural restlessness“. Obviously the conditions of the living quaters of the factory workers were characterized by lack and congestion. According to the regulations of those times apartments were considered overcrowded when all inhabitants of ten years and older had less than 10m3 of volume, the equivalent of 3 to 4 sqm of floorspace per person. It meant that the appartments, having an average size of 30sqm were inhabited by at least 10 people, many of whom were not of the same family, but subtenants and members of a floating population. The city-internal migration was strong in Cologne at those times. In Bayenthal it was extreme: Half of all families moved houses at least once every year.The urban drifting workers moved regularly with all their belongings through the streets of Bayenthal on the lookout for the next miserable apartment.
Of course this condition could be traced back to certain financial speculations being conducted at that time. Only a few meters from those overcrowded houses and miserably dense appartements was a wasteland area, originally planned to be used by the factory, but never having been utilized by it. In fact, Bayenthal was never really a suburb in the urban sense, but always rather a great object of speculation. It consisted mainly of three distinct parts and uses: the metalworking factory and a few other industrial production sites occupied the largest part of Bayenthal and reached up to the riverfront. The second kind of use was of course housing, of the densest kind, but only made dense through the third kind of use which was a „none-use“, or the privatised wasteland. Only through this large empty site the lack of reasonable housing was produced, which in turn triggered high levels of rent and therefore a good turnover and profit for the corporate landlords. This privatised wasteland therefore had to adopt important urban functions, less in the sense of quality and empty space, but more in its task to produce an urban insufficiency, and to make this insufficiency economically productive.
Obviously this construction of insufficiency is a fragile system as it is dependent of factors like prices of land and property, population growth or decline, economical success of the production sector and of course local politics. In the latter years of the nineteenth and the first decade of the twentieth century this situation and the condition of urban insufficiency changed very rapidly. The main investors, living in the very serene upper class neighbourhood of Marienburg, just south of Bayenthal, realised that a large profitability lay in the conversion of wasteland into buildable property, that a big increase of landvalue could be achieved in the drawing up of a development plan. Land and property thus turned into a very mobile object of trade, into merchandise. Empty sites were bought one after the other, an urban development plan was initiated at the municipal planning department, and thereafter the sites could be sold off again with high profit. The interest did not lie in the urban development itself, but merely in the change of urban conditioning, or legal status which produced a value shift. This new business idea coincided with a strong recession of the german steel industry in the first years of the new century. The factory in Bayenthal was hit badly and suddenly came under financial pressure. The industrial privatised wasteland, which had produced the urban insufficiency was converted into buildable property and sold off. Small detached and semi-detached houses were built upon it for an uprising middle-class market. Great attention was given to the fact that those micro-villas were always one or two dimensions smaller than the „real“ villas of Marienburg, securing thereby the comfortable difference in affluence between Marienburg and Bayenthal.
This interim position, the position of the middle ground, which Bayenthal took upon, shaped the image and character of the suburb upto contemporary times. Wedged in between the affluent suburb of Marienburg and the indeed very charismatic worker’s area of the Cologne „Südstadt“ (southcity), Bayenthal has remained a suburb without character, neither industrial nor residential, neither shaped by the working class nor by affluence. Of all Cologne areas, Bayenthal is possibly the one with the least identity, the one that refuses classification and categorization most. Played upon by real estate speculators and urbanistically strangled by an oversized factory, it never had the possibility of establishing an identity. The factory, which in the mean time had been taken over by the BAMAG (Berlin - Anhalt machine construction company) closed its doors only in 1968 and was torn down. The vacuum remained only very briefly until the biggest german insurance company, Allianz AG, constructed a huge housing development with over one thousand apartments on its site. Referencing the „genus loci“, those appartment buildings were clad with an imitation of a brick surface, as brick denotes an industrial image.

A city in discontent.

In the beginning of the seventies of the twentieth century an urban masterplan was devised for Bayenthal, which since then has never been applied in a single instance. It was a stillborn, the desperate and utterly misdirected attempt to react to a then pressing urban problem: the exodus from the city. Since the early sixties more and more young families moved out of urban housing areas into the rural and to the villages surrounding the cities in order to fulfill their dreams of that uprising prosperous middle class: The own small house with garden and garage, enough space for their little son and daughter, the dog and some DIY equipment in the garage, as the new sedan can easily park outside on the street, where it is whashed every sunday with the garden hose.
This dream of the young families was the nightmare of every city! Thereupon the desperately needed tax funds were reduced by a large sum. The communal expenses though, did not diminish, but only climbed because of the rising traffic and pressure upon infrastructure. In the years from 1950 to 1970 Bayenthal’s population dropped from its peak of 8200 to just over 6000, which represents a decrease of 25%. Cornered and under big financial pressure the city considered various options and came up with a curious proposal: To prevent more families moving out into the countryside, the countryside has to come into the city. And this proposal would be realised best with a municipal development plan for Bayenthal, the „Bebauungsplan Nr. 68419/02“ dated 17th August 1970. Represented in its local bureaucratical method and formulated in view of the german petit-bourgeois, it was possibly the most radical vision that Bayenthal should ever be faced with. The main street of Bayenthal, Goltsteinstraße, was supposed to lose its tramline, which ever since the late nineteenth century had connected the southern suburbs with the inner city, and it was then supposed to be converted completely. The width of the street to be doubled, the density of construction was supposed to be cut in half with a predominance of fully detached buildings. Any commercial use, restaurants, trade or small scale industrial use was forbidden and the maximum building height was practically limited to two floors. With these new sets of regulations the rural was to move into the urban, so that the families would not move into the rural anymore.
Not for a single instance, this development plan of Bayenthal, this vision of the rural within the urban, was to be applied - even though it is still binding law - as it ignores two fundamental aspects in its formulation: First of all, most houses along that main road were listed buildings, i.e. historical landmarks, having been constructed at the turn of the century, were therefore not allowed to be torn down so that a widening of the road was not possible. And second, the obligatory maximum density of construction, that is, building height and plot coverage, was so low, that no profit whatsoever could be achieved at all, with any kind of construction or programme. All constructions were destined for loss. This development plan was the first municipal planning instrument in the history of Bayenthal upon whose establishment the property prices received a dramatic blow. The Bayenthal Bubble had burst! It was an „anti-speculator-development-plan“ par excellence.

The discontent investor

Located on that main street, Goltsteinstraße, in the middle of the area affected by that development plan is a site currently occupied by a storage space and facing the street with a large entrance gate, considered a historical landmark. Once the storage space is torn down, the site is supposed to be developed. The investor who owns the site is a small-scale real-estate developer who, having studied and worked for a few years in the field mathematics, and is now building and selling appartments to make a living, had previously acquired the site in a combinatory deal with a different site close by. That other project, located just around the corner, had already been processed, the building built and all appartments been sold. The site on Goltsteinstraße though, proved to be far more difficult. Having received a design proposal and a quote for the projected cost from a large general contractor, he could easily calculate that with the very average design proposal and the expected turnover through the sales, a debit would generated, as the 250sqm flatspace multiplied with the average saleprice would be below the construction cost plus property value. In other words, the site was commercially not viable.
Only one possibility remained, as much as the investor was very critical about it: Architecture. If the developer would, as he calculated, invest a certain percentage of surplus in „interesting architecture“, he could possibly receive a overproportional increase in the salesprice and therefore finish off the project without a deficit. This decision, arising purely from a cost-benefit calculation, without any emotional commitment, resulted in the best prerequisite of the project. The second one being the fact that the investor specifically said that he did not want to be an architect and had no interest in acting like one. Therefore the tasks were devided and the work could commence.

The Design

The 5.50m wide and 25m deep site, in combination with all norms, rules, fire regulations, building laws, the municipal development plan and the rules of „construction near landmark buildings“ result in a very clearly defined and non-ambiguous volume. Form follows Law! This starting position forms the first volume of the building: a transparent (as transparent as the law, as Kafka once said) and orthogonal volume, that out of respect, or for safety reasons, steps back from history by one meter, and thereby reacts to the municipal building line set in the development plan. In the back part of the site, as a full construction covering the whole site is obviously not allowed according to the development plan, a stepping down of the volume is created by terraces on each level. It is the proper volume of the building, which is formulated according to all laws and binds itself to the rules. The „legal“ volume.

The second volume of the building is formed through different measures. It is the defiant volume. How many rules can be disregarded in a place dominated and strangled by rules. First of all, the volume as a whole is not allowed to exist at all, as its complete floor area exceeds the maximum area permitted in the development plan. Hence, the volume in itselfis illegal. Being a non-orthogonal, free-formed body, it is mainly opaque and traces a path from streetlevel through the gate, moving up the floors, piercing through them, and facing with its main mass at the upper levels back down upon the street, thereby realising a loop around that gate, the historical monument. Its windows, goggle-eyed, look into the sky, onto the terraces and down on the street. Every single surface of its faceted volume throws a „shadow-area“ onto one of the neighboring sites, something forbidden by german planning law, and in most cases the official formulas for calculating their sizes cannot be applied onto the shape of that volume. The fire-regulations are disregarded and the main mass of the volume encroaches the street again, crossing the municipal building line. Not a single exteriour wall is standing perpendicular upright and the differentiation between wall, roof and floor, the main categories of building elements in architecture, is disolved. It is covered with a bright red polyurethan coating which allows for a “construction without details” and forms a continuous skin over all surfaces of the building. Being disrespectful to the german building code and the laws and regulations of that site in particular, it is the „illegal“ volume. Both combined, they form the building.
After only 18 months of processing time, the planning application is accepted without objections, thereby exceeding the official maximum time of processing sixfold.

Architecture in Bayenthal

What does this architecture want in Bayenthal. The building is an expression and reacts to the urban condition of that part of Cologne. Having always been the toy of the real-estate investors and speculators, the building introduces a foreign body into the urban fabric, which is very receptible for that. The building moves right up to the limits of the site, or rather, exceeds them, in its ratio of massing, in its measurements, in its complexity and its materiality. It overloads or strains the site, and is in a certain way ruthless to it. Maybe it is one of these architectural interventions which are not in the interest of the suburb. Maybe it has a self-sufficiency. But in all these examinations, it expresses the economic situation, the constellation of laws and rules to form, and the sociocultural condition of the suburb in a built form. As foreign as the building might seem in the context of the area, as more it acts upon the history, the state of the urban fabric, and attempts to formulate an enrichment out of this immediate context. And attempts of course, as Bayenthal is used to, to view the context as its capital.

M Herz ©