Solar Modernism
WERNER SOBEK AND THE NEW AGE OF THE ENGINEER
By NIKLAS MAAK
It was the year 1849 when Joseph Monier astounded the field of gardening with his very durable, yet also tremendously heavy and entirely non-transportable flowerpots. Despite malicious criticism, Monier carried on working with his pots and, eighteen years later, scored a patent for a light “moveable container made of iron and cement.” More patents followed for covers, panels, and stairs made out of the same materials, but decades would pass before architects discovered the enormous potential of the invention of steel-enforced concrete, before it became the foundation of a new architectural aesthetic.
A similar series of events can be seen in solar technology today. Solar cells have been around for quite a while, and an aesthetic of solar-oriented architecture worthy of the name is only a recent development. There is a building in Stuttgart that may well soon be recognized as an incunabulum of a solar modernism. Its architect is Werner Sobek – and he’s not even an architect; he’s an engineer.
Approaching this Swabian city, you first begin to see harbingers of this building – and at first glance, these harbingers may seem to be optical illusions. There, not far from the autobahn, is a glass object in a park, an eight-meter-wide soap bubble made of a new composite material of glass and plastic. It is not supported by any steel construction or braced by any tension. You would even be afraid to touch it; you’d expect it to pop any minute. But it won’t.
The magic bubble is situated on the premises of the legendary ILEK (Institute for Lightweight Development and Construction) in Stuttgart, regarded as one of the most important research centers for the science of engineering in the world. Whether it’s textiles, building methods, self-adapting and reinforced glass, transparent, self-compressing or fiber-reinforced concrete, foamed metals – there is nothing the engineers don’t experiment with here. Heading up the Institute is Werner Sobeck who, as director, follows the great engineers Frei Otto and Werner Schlaich.
German architecture has a long utopian tradition in its construction, ranging from August von Voits, who extended the tradition with his Glass Palace in Munich in 1854 as well as the Crystal Palace in London, back through to Friedrich Gilly, who died in 1800 before he reached the age of 30, but left behind drafts in which all extraneous decor is left out to make way for the pure experience of the construction of space. This line runs from Gilly through Frei Otto’s famous tent roofs in Montreal and Munich to the present day. Sobek, too – as an engineer who specializes in light steel construction, glass facades, membrane architecture, rope nets, and special construction – is part of this tradition of a radically modernist construction. He has advised Helmut Jahn and Renzo Piano and has most recently worked with Ben van Berkel on the design for the new Daimler-Benz Museum in Stuttgart with its three interwoven spirals. This close cooperation with van Berkel itself shows that the usual model of an architect and engineer working together – one drafts up a plan, the other calculates the realization of the construction – is an idea whose time has passed. These days it’s the engineers leading architects to new forms based on their knowledge of new materials. Genuine innovation not only in building technology but also in building aesthetics are taking place in the offices of engineers, and this can be seen, too, in two of Sobek’s works – his own house, called R128, and the soon to be realized solar marvel R129.
Sobek became internationally known particularly for R128, his home in Stuttgart. The multi-storied glass cube is the most radical update of the classically modern penchant for lightness. Here, you sit right in the middle of nature, separated only by a high-tech glass coating. But, as opposed to Mies van der Rohe’s Farnsworth House or Johnson’s glass bungalow, this optical limitlessness does not come at the expense of an outrageous waste of energy. “Ecological modernism” realizes its affinity for nature technically as well. As little material as possible is used in the construction of the building; maintenance of the building requires very little energy; and the materials have to be recyclable. Thanks to a photovoltaic installation on the roof, R128 covers all its own energy needs.
Architects don’t often like to admit it, but engineers can also create spaces, and Sobek’s R128 proves this as well. Many critics who have seen only photos of the house that do indeed make it look as if it were as inviting as an institute for biological warfare denounce the house as cold and uncomfortable – but once you’ve stepped inside, you immediately feel the richness of the spatial impressions offered by its modular system. There are plateaus with expansive views of the Stuttgart valley, which looks a bit like Nice but without the Mediterranean; but there are also cozy little niches with sofas and books where the couple – Sobek’s wife is an art historian – relaxes and reads.
Where all these experiments are leading in a few years, in particular, the puzzling glass bubble in the garden of the ILEK, is made more clear in the model for the building known as R129, which is to be built in a field in Upper Bavaria. Like a biomorphic space capsule, the building plummets down to the present from the future. The transitions between floors, ceilings, and walls are fluid. The exterior skin of this inhabitable UFO is to be made of an artificial material that is both extraordinarily light and transparent; a millimeter-thin layer of glass is to be laminated over the plastic so that the building cannot be scratched yet can be cleaned. This covering will also be metalized, which will keep the heat from penetrating in during the summer and out during the winter. With an electro-chrome film, the covering can also be darkened so that you can switch from transparent to translucent to opaque.
The floor panels, made of carbon, have a heating and cooling system to regulate the temperature of the building; what’s more, the floor has room for storage as well as connections for electricity, water, compressed air, and communications. These floor panels are also equipped with mechanical ventilation and a means of reclaiming heat. Solar cells are to be implemented within the exterior of the covering, resulting in a mere twenty percent loss of light inside, even as they provide a major source of the building’s energy. This signals the end of the age of those awkward solar panels slapped onto rooftops like blue slabs. There is more to the spaceship-like form of this ecological modernism – the actual living space of R129 – than the bio-morphism currently associated with the fashionable forms of the Space-Age utopianism of the ’60s. Sobek draws closer to nature not only aesthetically but also in his construction, creating an entirely new experience of space. R129’s glass bubble can be as transparent as a soap bubble or as smoothly opaque as a seashell’s interior. The way the facade can be switched from transparency to opaqueness will make curtains look like remnants of the Stone Age. With R129, the utopian vision of architecture as a second skin for people will be one step closer. Shielded from outside view, the temperature perfectly controlled, the inhabitant will be able to move as freely, naked and unprotected in this glass cocoon as a mollusk in its shell. Large circular, screwable openings replace windows and, “The square holes in brick walls,” says Sobek, “may soon be a throwback to a distant past.”
Sobek brings together two sides that have long stood in opposition to each other in Germany: the proto-modernist awe of high-tech and the environmental movement, usually so critical of progress and positioning itself as a counter-force to expansionist modernism with its resource-devouring appetite for natural destruction. Sobek pleas for a green, high technology like few others. Protecting the environment with high-tech – the extent to which this sort of thinking can lead to real results on a broad scale can be seen in a kilometer-long roof, resting on a mere twenty supports, over the airport in Bangkok. When a heavy rain pounds down on the roof, it lowers itself up to forty centimeters as if it weren’t made of concrete and steel but instead of some flexible living material.
Sobek’s buildings are nature-friendly in their construction as well. They can be completely deconstructed. Future generations can easily take R128 apart since it is put together with only screws and removable parts, all of which are recyclable. All that would be left is the concrete foundation. Sobek himself has even considered taking down his house to build a new one on the valuable property.
In Le Corbusier’s 1922 treatise, Vers une Architecture, there is a chapter entitled “Three Warnings for Architects.” The gist of these warnings is the recommendation to take a look at engineers’ constructions, particularly the new American grain silos. “The engineer,” writes Le Corbusier, “driven by the rule of efficiency and led by his calculations, brings us into harmony with the laws of the universe.” That may be stated with a bit more pathos than necessary, but it was primarily a polemic aimed at the architects of his day who limited themselves to decorating their buildings with ornament as a baker would a wedding cake. And all in all, when you consider that architectural innovations today are essentially remixes of various preexisting styles, Le Corbusier’s critique is still not all that far off the mark.
In the 20th century, architecture was an expression of relentless expansion. Concrete reinforced with steel made possible the rapid construction of satellite settlements for hundreds of thousands, as well as ever-taller skyscrapers. Any affinity for nature was purely optical and metaphorical. The classic modern bungalow, such as those Neutra built in the Western US, was an abstract homage to the American wilderness and the myth of the cowboy who, far and away from the cities, was out there conquering nature. Where the horse once quenched its thirst, the convertible parked alongside the pool; the campfire became the fireplace. Unfortunately, these bungalows, which opened out onto nature via huge windowpanes, could only be heated with enormous amounts of energy. After the expansionist 20th century, with its resource-devouring filigree aesthetic, the most important task facing contemporary architecture is not an aesthetic but an ecological one. Concrete allowed for experimentation in construction; solar cells allow for one on an ecological level. Ever since postmodernism arrived in the cities, correcting the worst developmental mistakes of modernism – that is, wherever it has appeared as something other than a torte-like orgy of ornamentation – and since deconstructivism, which has been engaged with Denkgebäude, there have been few far-reaching developments in architecture. The bio-morphism of the past few years, which has melded a fascination with developments in biotechnology with a retro-futuristic glee over the pop designs of the ’60s, might be compared with classic modernism as Mannerism was to the High Renaissance. And even the passionate arguments over a second or third wave of modernism were ultimately merely discussions of how to decorate the same old boxes with the same old concrete construction, developed 100 years earlier, at their core.
But it does seem that city planners, engineers, and architects, 100 years after the launch of the reinforced concrete aesthetic, are now finally discovering the aesthetic potential of solar technology. In Barcelona, you can see how a city can be enriched when solar panels aren’t lined up on roofs or out in fields but instead in the middle of public spaces. Out on the premises of the “Forum 2004,” once one of the least attractive terrains, complete with a purification plant, a large solar roof is erected as a sort of modern loggia, generating energy for the neighborhood and providing shade for everyone when the beach gets too hot. One pioneer of modern solar energy was the Parisian architect Françoise-Hélène Jourda, who developed a sensational pavilion for the international building exhibition in Emscher Park in which, like a giant conservatory, individual buildings were set up. Under the 9,300-square-meter photovoltaic roof, there was a micro-world with a Mediterranean climate and streets and plazas; year-round, temperatures are like those in Nice. A nearly megalomaniacal solar chimney power plant is currently being developed by the Stuttgart engineer Jörg Schlaich for the Australian company Enviro-Mission in the desert of New South Wales. The tower, almost a kilometer high, would be, if completed, the tallest building in the world and produce clean energy for 200,000 households. A gigantic greenhouse with a diameter of seven kilometers beneath the tower would utilize sunrays to generate warm air. The difference in temperature would drive the heated air up the tower as if up a chimney. Turbines, driven by the movement of the air, would generate electricity. The project, with an estimated price tag of around 500m euros (and which has been criticized by environmentalists as too extravagant) is to go online in fifteen to twenty years.
Maybe it will take quite a while before a solar aesthetic produces an equivalent to the masterworks of concrete modernism – but when the Parisian gardener Joseph Monier placed iron rods in the moist concrete of his flower pots, no one could have imagined that within a few decades those pots would be the forerunners to buildings like the Flat Iron and the Empire State Building in New York.
Economic and ecological demands will shape the architecture of the future. Alongside traditional architecture, an ecologically motivated art of engineering is evolving, distilling previously unknown forms from the possibilities of new materials; in terms of the aesthetics of building, more can be expected here than from the classic approach. Refusing to step foot in buildings like the new yet all too nostalgic Ritz Carlton Tower in Berlin, harking back to the New York architecture of the 1920s, and even going so far to criticize its style as an “immoral” attempt to flee its own time, Werner Sobek is a key figure in this process – in his Stuttgart-based laboratory, architecture is beginning to free itself from questions of style. In its way, R129 will be a Denkgebäude of a new kind. With its aesthetics driven by ecological high technology, a new sort of contemporary engineering is on the rise.
