FOSTER AT THE COMMERZBANK

Completed one year before Castalia, and constructed less than five hundred kilometres away, in another historic precinct of Europe – the Bankenviertel, Frankfurt’s traditional banking district in the Westend – the Commerzbank Headquarters (1997) eschews notions of the “decorated shed” (a building with “a rhetorical front and conventional behind”), and presents itself as a new and improved reprisal of the Modernist “duck” (wherein exterior and interior are an integrated whole, and where both reflect the

20

building’s purpose).21 _{Although these two contemporaneous buildings share high-rise}

typology, neither is quite as ruthless as the prolific towers that assert their spectacularity in metropolises the world over and, more often than not, achieve only the anonymity of sameness. Castalia and the Commerzbank are similar in that they each evidence less of that sameness. But, at a more fundamental level, their dissimilarities are striking. As a “decorated shed,” Castalia’s empathy toward its situation is applied, symbolised superficially by cladding or decoration. As a “duck,” the Commerzbank’s situational empathy is purportedly in-built, the whole of the building intended to be a symbol. With mixed results and to varying degrees, the Commerzbank does symbolise an empathy toward the architectural, social, and ecological aspects of its situation. In each aspect, instantiations of kenosis can be seen, but the ecological aspect is most revealing, because it is that aspect which effects the other instantiations. Indeed, the Commerzbank’s architectural and social achievements, to the extent they occur, are by- products of its being the “world’s first ecological office tower,”22 _{and its being attentive to}

some of the complexities of that distinction.

Nonetheless, before it is an ecological office tower – the topic of subsequent discussion – the Commerzbank is first an office tower, freighted with all of that typology’s associated symbolism, including the excesses of capitalism and American-style urbanisation. The story of its contentious prehistory, as well as its controversial and prolonged naissance, is well-documented by Steven Moore and Ralf Brand.23 Of importance, here, is to note that much of what appears to be empathy is actually part of a forced, and enforced, political solution. For example, project designer Norman Foster (1935-) and his firm, Foster + Partners, indicate that empathy with the district’s existing architectural fabric is reflected in “the restoration and sensitive rebuilding of the perimeter structures to reinforce the original scale of the block.”24 _{That feature of the project,}

21

In Learning from Las Vegas, Venturi and wife Denise Scott Brown criticise Modernism for its allegiance to “the duck … a special building that is a symbol,” and suggest that the duck must yield to Post-Modernism’s “decorated shed … the conventional shelter that applies symbols.” The Venturis laud the superiority of the

decorated shed, because therein “space and structure are directly at the service of the program, and

ornament is applied independently of them.” In contrast, they suggest that ‘the duck’ distorts space, structure, and program, in favour of sculptural and monumental expression. See R. Venturi, D. Scott Brown, and S. Izenour, Learning from Las Vegas: The Forgotten Symbolism of Architectural Form, Revised ed. (Cambridge, MA, and London: The MIT Press, 1977), 87-92; and H. Foster, "Image Building," in Architecture: Between Spectacle and Use, ed. A. Vidler (Williamstown, MA: Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, 2008), 166- 167. The Venturis’ analogy – and consequent critique – is a curious one, since the (zoological) duck has evolved to be nothing more or less than the unity it needs to be for survival and propagation. The duck is hardly distorted by nature for mere artificial or extraneous purposes. Arguably, rather than being designed for purpose, the duck – and all evolutionary life – has merely taken on the behaviour and functionality that its evolvements permit and advantage.

22

"Commerzbank Headquarters, Frankfurt, Germany, 1991-1997," Foster + Partners, http://www.fosterandpartners.com/projects/commerzbank-headquarters/.

23

S.A. Moore and R. Brand, "The Banks of Frankfurt and the Sustainable City," The Journal of Architecture 8, no. 1 (2003): 7-16; and, in longer format, S.A. Moore, Alternative Routes to the Sustainable City: Austin, Curitiba, and Frankfurt (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2007), 117-151.

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however, is primarily necessitated by the inherently dissimilar scale that a 300 metre, forty-five storey tower presents to a five- and six-storey neighbourhood (see fig. 4.4).

FIGURE 4.4

The forty-five storey Commerzbank and its low-rise perimeter surround.

Furthermore, the notion of a low-scale perimeter arises not foremost as a proactive and progressive architectural proposal but as a result of “intense, detailed negotiations between the Commerzbank and the city,” well before Foster’s commissioning. From those prolonged negotiations emerged the mandate for housing as part of the complex.25 The inclusion of apartments, ultimately located in the project’s low- rise perimeter buildings, addresses a vital social need in the district. But, since residential

25

use comprises only slightly more than three percent of the project’s floor area, and less than half of the floor area devoted to car parking,26 its presence appears to speak more of acquiescence than empathy.27 Indeed, the settlement that produced these results was characterised, by citizen activists, as offering “no reason to rejoice but a compromise we can live with.”28

None of this is to say that such a solution is necessarily made less empathetic by its provenance. Rather, it is to say that these gestures of apparent empathy are more indicative of tolerance than kenosis. Kenosis is engaged volitionally, even if reluctantly. In this case, opening-up comes as a requisite condition of the project’s realisation, and therefore must be tolerated. While tolerance is not unrelated to kenosis, it is absent the essential self-emptying that arises out of attentiveness to the other; the ‘emptying’, here, having to be mandated by some of those very others to whom attention might otherwise be volitionally directed. It is therefore also absent the full potential for gathering-in and pouring-out that kenosis entails.

Of similar concern is any notion that some twenty years of negotiations – which merely move the situation from one that is competitive and conflicted, to one that is tolerable – portray an entirely virtuous and paradigmatic process of conflict resolution, or any corollary notion that mere conflict resolution exemplifies kenosis. Describing the project’s emergence and its manifestation as architecture, Moore and Brand reveal the reasons for such concern:

One cannot help but be impressed by the degree of conflict resolution achieved in the process of developing Frankfurt’s banking landscape. Although the articulation of differences in 1980 – the height of the housing conflict – was distinct and powerful, by 2001 respondents from each interest group voiced only minor dissatisfactions. This may well be a sign that most interests were satisfied and that no principal interest was vanquished. It may also be a sign that weaker interests were suppressed. Of course, there were many less visible interests, such as Jews, bank employees, and dislocated renters that were never invited to participate in the discussion in the first place.29

Notwithstanding aspects of success, this process of conflict resolution is embedded with the potential for wearing down or overcoming certain interests and, equally, excluding some. Moreover, one interest holds the trump. In its enshrinement of the concept of ‘weighing up’ (Abwägung), German law grants to planning officials the ability to determine which interests hold sway.30 That, of course, might be used to favour more weakly

26

"Commerzbank Head Office, Frankfurt am Main," (Frankfurt: Commerzbank AG, n.d.), at heading, 'Facts and Figures'.

27

Corroborating my view, Moore and Brand suggest that "60-70 units (of housing) is a drop in the bucket compared to the number of units that were displaced by related commercial development in the

neighbourhood," which their sources estimate at nearly 30,000 units. See Moore and Brand, "The Banks of Frankfurt and the Sustainable City," 18.

28 Ibid., 14. 29 Ibid., 19. 30 Ibid., 20.

represented interests, but it can equally be used in the opposite manner, taking advantage of such weakness to favour dominant or what appear to be ‘majority’ voices, often those who hold financial power.

The ‘process’ that Moore and Brand describe is not kenotic. While conflict resolution may include kenotic effect, kenosis is not mere conflict resolution, especially not by way of so-called compromise. The value of kenosis lies not in its capacity to resolve conflict but, rather, to obviate it, even while making room for reticence and challenge. Such is effected through a kind of hybridisation: the mutual transforming of selves, others, and other things in a given situation, without their loss of respective identities. This hybridisation is not simply the finding of compromise. More precisely, it is not the nominal changing of a situation’s other things, by dominating and largely unchanged selves, in order that the situation comes to be seen as tolerable by its others – those who have also been changed by a process that produces fatigue and encourages acquiescence. Furthermore, kenosis cannot exclude any of the others and other things that comprise a situation. And, since kenosis is a complex and entangled procession of events, it is not and cannot be made into a determinate process that leads to if-then outcomes. (These aspects of kenosis, which cut across entrenched hierarchies and determinist views, are discussed more fully in Chapter 7.) As the Commerzbank project demonstrates, the mere implementation of widespread public talk does not, in itself, convincingly evidence kenosis or the situational empathy that kenosis can foster.

More convincing is the project’s empathy toward ecological concerns, and the kenosis that instantiates. From the time of the project’s inception, energy efficiency and environmental friendliness were amongst the aspirations of both city and bank. Such notions required no imposition by authorities. For the bank, they were also a part of corporate policy,31 presenting both direct and indirect commercial value. Not surprisingly, the Commerzbank has come to be seen as a symbolic milestone in the environmental movement of the late twentieth century, a movement that continues even stronger today. Yet it is an ambiguous, if not contradictory, symbol. Some observers see the notion of a sustainable skyscraper, particularly one that headquarters a financial institution, as oxymoronic; effectively ‘green-washing’ corporate hegemony.32 _{There are, however,}

those who view the project’s technology-based energy efficiencies as at least more environmentally conscious than that of equivalent structures, and therefore they applaud its achievements. Of course, the latter stance requires resignation to the inevitability of high-rise buildings, a resignation that not all accept. Such contradiction can be extended

31

Ibid., 14. Moore and Brand characterise the project brief as "a material proposal, or recipe for conflict resolution."

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to almost all architecture. Self-evidently, building effects environmental change, whether directly or indirectly, whether at micro or macro scales; and due to its inherent consumptiveness, building effects change that includes deleterious dimensions, often of significant consequence. Hence, in design, realisation, and utilisation, architecture can only be made relatively more ‘friendly’ toward the environment by virtue of its being made less consumptive of resources, or more worthy of the consumption it effects. In other words, architecture can only be made increasingly empathetic to the others and other things that make up the complex environmental situation. The Commerzbank takes steps toward such goals, and not without some success. Whether it – or any architecture – does enough to mitigate and warrant its environmental cost is a subject worthy of debate, but one beyond the scope of this discourse. Despite all of the inherent self-assertiveness of its high-rise typology, the Commerzbank’s environmental attitude effects an opening- up; that is, a rising attentiveness to at least some dimensions of the environment, which is as unprecedented as it is incomplete and insufficient. It also spawns the expansion of such opening-up and attentiveness by a new generation of architecture’s creators, out of which might emerge the kind of thinking that sees high-rise architecture become superfluous, salvational, or transformed into something as yet unimagined.

Commerzbank’s eventual commissioning of Norman Foster mirrors its environmental commitment. Foster’s firm is well known to champion high-tech architecture and superior environmental performance. While such performance can be seen as having a kenotic dimension – an opening-up to certain environmental others – that is not of primary interest, here, since there is ample analysis and documentation of the Commerzbank’s energy efficiencies available elsewhere.33 _{Of greater interest is the}

manner in which the building’s design and realisation has yielded or contracted – that is, self-emptied – in order to make room for heightened environmental attentiveness (at least on selected fronts). Its self-emptying must be seen relative to more typical examples of high-rise typology. In that light, what the Commerzbank empties itself of is a significant measure of developer voraciousness. It is to some lesser extent that this building exploits its typology’s dogged determination to maximise those things that maximise financial performance. Of course, even the maximisation of energy-efficient technologies can be seen as arising out of exactly such determination, since, in the long term, operating expenses are thereby reduced. But sophisticated technology also effects high capital costs, which can dull investor attraction. It is not through such technologies, however, that the project relinquishes some of its typology’s grip on maximising efficiencies. Instead, it is owing to uncommon attitudes toward the relationality of space,

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humanity, and nature that the project begins to ‘let go’ and become something that most of its siblings are not.

Unlike more formulaic skyscrapers, the Commerzbank does away with the customary central service core; a feature known for organising all forms of vertical distribution with maximum efficiency, and thereby contributing to the greatest possible ratio of net to gross floor area. In its place is a 160-metre high atrium, which offers light and ventilation to improve the spatial quality of inside spaces,34 even as it also increases the sense of relationality that occupants have with other occupants across the atrium. There are, however, associated ‘inefficiencies’ in planning, construction, and cost. Splitting vertical services into three smaller cores and relocating them to the triangular building’s three corners, the design denies this high-rise its expected corner spaces, prized for dual aspect views, coveted for private offices, and typically seen as privileged and prime-value real estate.35 Thus, a more egalitarian configuration begins to breakdown entrenched hierarchical elements (even while creating new ones). But none of the building’s yieldingness is as significant as that which grants the building its nine ‘sky gardens’. Each four stories in height, the enclosed but ventilated gardens are staggered up the exterior, three on each of three sides. As a result, only two-thirds of any given floor plate is available for office use. The balance is ‘sacrificed’, either as the garden floor at one level or, at the other three levels, as part of the void creating the garden’s height and volume. Occupants at every office level are thereby offered views and natural ventilation by one of the gardens, and no occupant is more than three floors away from accessing a garden for informal meetings and breaks. Not only are these gardens part of the environmental scheme – providing natural light and ventilation to offices and atrium alike – they also create openness and spatial volume of a kind that is highly uncommon in typical high-rise structures. And, like the central atrium, the gardens enhance the relationality of both occupants and spaces.

With its atrium and sky gardens, the Commerzbank yields to many of the others and other things that comprise its situation. It is emptied of substantial portions of its primary functional potential: the efficient provision of office space. But, as a result, its potential as a healthy work environment – promising greater human productivity – is paradoxically enhanced, such that there is at least partial justification for what some would otherwise see as an investment in inefficiencies. It is in the spaces emptied of expected office usages – the inefficient spaces that are something only because of their

34

The maximum distance from work station to operable window is nine metres, less than one structural bay. See ibid., 15.

35

Three decades before the Commerzbank, Perkins and Will daringly maximised the corner real estate in their design of the U.S. Gypsum Building in Chicago. The corners were ‘notched’ to, in effect, create eight corners instead of four, and the building was rotated forty-five degrees counter to its site in order to maximise light and air to each side. See Perkins and Blum, Oral History of Lawrence Bradford Perkins: 107-109.

relative nothingness – that the Commerzbank best instantiates kenosis. Such ‘weakening’ can be seen as a strengthening of this building. It can also be seen to contribute to a strengthening of the high-rise typology, though that contribution risks overstatement. In the modern urgency to find the ‘new’ and label it accordingly, the Commerzbank has been described as “a significant new building type,”36 and “the reinvention of the skyscraper as a building type.”37 _{But, it is neither. Although}

demonstrably innovative in various respects, it remains an evolvement of the architectural tradition begun by William LeBaron Jenney in Chicago, with the first iron and steel framed high-rise, itself an evolvement of an even older tradition of high-rise construction.38 As such, it can lay claim to high-rise orthodoxy – that verticality and density moderate suburbanisation, and that centralisation reduces transport demands – but the facts remain that its gestures toward mixed-use are relatively modest, and that it continues to be a part of a still automobile-dependent urban environment.

Certainly, the project does not achieve anything as radical as Paolo Soleri’s “arcology,” which advocates “the expulsion of those elements that go for the chastising of the urban landscape and the punishment of its dwellers.”39 _{Nor could such achievement}

be expected of any one project. Yet the Commerzbank does take incremental and evolving steps – for some, glacial and insufficient – in Soleri’s direction. In its attempts at operational frugality, it reduces energy consumption, waste, and pollutants. And, in its attempts to foster relationality – human to human, and human to nature, even in an un-natural environment – it at least begins to acknowledge Soleri’s plea for “something