Born on 12 July 1926 in Kaiseresch (Eifel), Oswald Mathias Ungers helped shape the
international architectural scene of the second half of the 20th century. He studied at the Karlsruhe Technical University from 1947 to 1950 under Egon Eiermann, beginning a private practice in Cologne in 1950 and in Berlin in 1964. His work can be divided into three broad categories. His early career saw construction primarily of residences in a Modern style, up to the 1960s. This was followed by a theoretical and conceptual phase, from approximately 1963 to 1980, focusing on major competitions. The last decades of the 20th century provided Ungers with the opportunity for a full elaboration of his architectural ideas and ethos, based on intellectual and spiritual responsibility and the definition of architecture as an autonomous discipline. This commitment, together with his daring use of the cube form, situated him firmly as a leading figure in Postmodernism.
Ungers constructed his early works primarily in the Cologne area, where he opened his first office in 1950. The influence of Eiermann is unmistakable. The elegant lines of his single-family house on Oderweg (1951) in Cologne-Dünnwald or his apartment building on Hültzstrasse (1951) in Cologne-Braunsfeld underline a sleek and sober modernism as regards design and materials. Ungers’s residences from a few years later show an influence by the Brutalism movement, inspired by Le Corbusier, including experimentation with new approaches to space as well as material. The multiple-family residence on Brambachstrasse (1955–57) in Cologne-Dellbrück employed his material of choice, rough brick, and represented a departure from the earlier, simple box form typical of modernism. The design of the roof and eaves, situated behind the facade, is a technical feat that he would return to often in later works.
Ungers’s move toward new architectural forms and representations is clearest in his apartment building on Belvederstrasse (1958–59) in Cologne-Müngersdorf, where the stacked cubes form the basis of a new exploration of space and volume. Although the house’s materials and form reference the neighboring buildings, it stands out as a defiant, new construction. Its expressiveness has caused more than one critic to describe it as part of the German Expressionist movement, a development that plunged Ungers into an analysis of Expressionist architecture. His essay from this period, presented in 1964 in Florence at a symposium on Expressionism, declared his now famous motto “Construction is not utopia, but rather battle.” The library “cube house” addition (1989) strengthened the interplay of constructed and free spaces within and between the two buildings, lending the constellation an association of an urban setting and earning it the description of a city in miniature, or a house-city.
The early 1960s provided Ungers with a few larger projects, including the competitions for an art museum (1960) in Düsseldorf and a Roman-Germanic museum (1960) in Cologne. One of his biggest critical failures stems from this period as well, the residential construction of the Märkisches Viertel (1962–67) in Berlin-Wittenau. Initially designed as stacked buildings of 3 to 6 stories, the buildings were actually constructed with 8 to 16 stories, compromising the original statement of the design. This period represented a rupture in Ungers’s career, coinciding with an appointment at the Technical University in Berlin, where he taught from 1963 to 1969.
Partly because of a lack of commissions and partly the result of Ungers’s desire to reflect on his work, the next years were filled with a “theoretical” construction phase. In 1965 and 1967, he served as a visiting critic at Cornell University. Three projects from these years reflect the new conceptual forms that he had found for his architectural ideals: the design for the Dutch student dormitory (1964) in Enschede, the design for the Berlin museum complex (1965), and the design for the German embassy (1965) in Rome. Using the geometric forms of the circle, square, and triangle, Ungers proceeded to create variations on these basic themes. The result was a harmonious constellation of contrasts and progressions that would influence his work even decades later.
Although Ungers was unable to build most of the projects he designed during this period, usually competition designs, they helped define the possibilities and limits of his architectural thought and practice. Until the late 1970s, he produced numerous plans for major construction projects, including his design for the Berlin-Tegel airport (1966), with its flexible plan for updating the construction according to new airplane models and its emphasis on steel and aluminum. Ungers also entered the competition for Cologne’s Wallraf-Richartz Museum (1975), a design that foresaw the building as an extension of the cathedral area and connected the pedestrian zone with Breslauer Platz. He also began a time of much professional and academic international movement. In 1969 he became chair of the Department of Architecture at Cornell, and he opened an office in New York in 1970 after receiving his license there. In 1973 and 1978, he went to Harvard University as a visiting professor and was also a visiting professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, in 1974–75. In 1976 he opened an office in Frankfurt/Main. He went to the University for Applied Arts in Vienna from 1978 to 1980 and opened another office in Karlsruhe in 1983. He began to work at the university in Düsseldorf in 1986.
The late 1970s heralded a new era of large building projects, including the German Architectural Museum (1979–84) in Frankfurt and the residential complex on Lützowplatz (1979–83) in Berlin, with its bands of vertical window lines topped by triangular gables eliciting the impression of massive, moving arrows punctuating the long wall. Ungers’s practice was then inundated with commissions, establishing his signature OMU as an established but dynamic architectural firm. In this new period of construction, Ungers’s commitment to the cube form became the basis of almost all his future work. However, despite the reaffirmations of his theoretical plans, Ungers was forced to recognize that the translation of his designs into reality often resulted in compromises that weakened the strength of his structures. In this sense his architectural plans have been in some ways more important than the buildings themselves in elevating him to international status.
The last two decades of the 20th century offered Ungers the opportunity to realize many of his ideas in new forms. In 1990 he exhibited “Kubus,” five three-meter-high cubes in a Cologne gallery, demonstrating his mastery of dividing space between concrete forms and emptiness. Numerous publications date from these years as well, including his thoughtful anthology, Rectangular Houses (1986). His constructions reflect the near half century of attempts to infuse his designs with uncompromising boldness through imposing geometric forms, such as the Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar Research (1980–84) in Bremerhaven.
Ungers ended the 20th century with a personally satisfying commission: the design of the new Wallraf-Richartz Museum (1996–99) in Cologne. He thereby completed a project for which he had not been selected nearly two decades earlier. Opened in the first month of 2001, the building allowed Ungers to display the many successful techniques he developed during his career, in the city where he had first begun to build. The museum’s design alludes to its historic location between the Gürzenichstrasse and the city hall. Here, as in other designs, his building is a massive cube, but it is less imposing than in his other constructions, is less rigorous in its dimensions, and has an almost flowing, elegant quality. Now the newest home to Germany’s oldest private art collection, the Wallraf- Richartz Museum is a fitting testimony to Ungers’s determination to address the practical challenges of construction and tradition while insisting on architecture’s right to self- determination and a building’s responsibility to fulfill the individual spiritually and intellectually.
BENITA CAROL BLESSING
Sennott R.S. Encyclopedia of twentieth century architecture, Vol.3. Fitzroy Dearborn., 2005.
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