Faced with the debris and ruins caused by aerial bombing, a debate opened after the war about how to go about planning and reconstructing the city. Two apparently opposing positions on town planning and architecture were taken: the conservatives and the so-called Neues Bauen (New Building). On the town planning level, the conservative line was taken for the old city centres maintaining the old roads but modifying and widening the ring road and a few of the 1gth century roads.
The same conservative line gave rise architecturally to monumental and show buildings. Their restoration removed all traces of the war and surviving vulgarity through the artificial restitution of a lost image but one that had never existed. Against this, the fabric constituted of the minor buildings was radically substituted and transformed by type.
Conservatives and innovators, beyond differing positions of principal, paid representatives with reciprocal indifference to the ruins for authentic surviving remains of the city and its history intent by various means on the same objective of removing any perception of or materially disturbing evidence.
In the background of this general tendency, Hans Döllgast's work stands out as an isolated and significant exception. The restoration of some monumental buildings like the completed Alte Pinakothek and Alter Südlicher Friedhof were the results of initiatives by Döllgast teaching at the Technische Universität.
Restoration is not intended here in the reconstructive or substitutive sense but as a project and process of transformation and restitching of the artefact which is a condition for the real conservation and active continuation of its existence. Some components of the design approach to this transformation which will be summarized could stimulate interest and topicality even on the methodological level.
In Döllgast's projects, the debris and ruins should not be taken to mean valueless but as a material, economic and cultural resource to protect, re-use and actively integrate into the present. In doing this, the disturbing evidence is preserved as a witness to events which a categorical imperative cannot remove from historic conscience. Furthermore, a central theme is that the state of ruins could also be seen as a fruitful phenomenological reinterpretation leading to the discovery and unexpected activation of a latent time of the spatial and expressive potential of place and architecture.
Hans Döllgast’s work within the broader theoretical and design discourse on the relationship between architecture and ruins
I would like to conclude these notes on the relationship between architecture and ruins, as exemplified by Döllgast’s work, by briefly considering its placement within the broader theoretical and design context to which it still actively belongs.
I shall therefore begin by recalling the antagonism between the positions of John Ruskin and Eugène Viollet-le-Duc, which define the two extreme and opposing poles through which, around the mid-nineteenth century, the modern relationship with the testimonies of the past manifests itself: on the one hand, the contemplative veneration of the authenticity of the monument or its surviving parts, advocating for uncompromising protection against any attempt at restoration, reconstruction, or completion; on the other, the idea that the monument and the ruin may be coherently restored, rebuilt, and completed, provided that the one undertaking the work has fully assimilated the knowledge of the original builders. Thus, on the one side stands the thesis and the sense of rupture, of the irreparable break between the conditions and culture of the contemporary age and those of previous eras; on the other side, the thesis and the sense of a possible continuity in human culture, which could be described as evolutionary.
Between these two extremes, efforts toward mediation would emerge, driven not only by theoretical but also by operational necessities, most notably in the work of Camillo Boito at the end of the nineteenth century. Boito was irritated by Viollet-le-Duc’s interventions, particularly by the impossibility of distinguishing the original parts from the additions or modifications. He therefore affirmed the necessity and the right of the viewer to experience a critical perception of the monument as a historical document. For the completion of ancient ruins, he proposed the simple restoration of volumes without ornamental apparatus. The level of detail would increase as the age of the building approached the contemporary period. This idea of varying the degree of formal detailing depending on the monument’s age seems to translate, into visual terms, the difference between recent and distant memory: the more remote the past, the more blurred its contours.
The experience of time conveyed when observing a ruin or an old building acquired a fundamental significance for restoration theory and for projects concerning historical structures between the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Alois Riegl drew from this a new category of aesthetic and psychological value to add to the artistic and documentary values, asserting that Alterswert—the value of age—expresses a mode of feeling universally present in modern society, regardless of the degree of education or cultural background. It is precisely on this intuitive perception of the distinction between old and new that the “poetics of contrast” would be founded, a fundamental poetics of modern architecture in relation to historical contexts and preexisting structures.
In a significant essay published in Lotus International in 1985, Ignasi de Solà-Morales described the trajectory through which modern architecture moved from the poetics of contrast to that of analogy, arguing that these two attitudes correspond to different phases of the contemporary project: an initial phase of affirming the new system of modern values, and a later phase of crisis or relativization of modernity. As an example of the first phase, he cited, among others, Mies van der Rohe’s project for a glass skyscraper in Berlin’s Friedrichstraße in 1922. The silhouette of the new building stands out against the dark backdrop of the compact, massive nineteenth-century block fabric—by contrast, exhibiting lightness, transparency, luminosity, verticality, and individuality. Subsequently, particularly after the Second World War, a progressive shift toward a dialogical attitude with preexistences would occur—initially abstract and contrapuntal yet conciliatory, based on the structural relationships between different architectural languages, with Carlo Scarpa serving as its most accomplished interpreter. This evolution would eventually culminate in the establishment of analogical relations even at the formal level, while maintaining the principle of critical distinction between contemporary interventions and historical preexistences.
This issue of Lotus also contains a brief essay of mine on the work of Karl Josef Schattner in the historical context of Eichstätt, a small town in Bavaria. There, I only briefly noted that Schattner had been a student of Döllgast. Now, after a closer examination of Döllgast’s work, the contemporary relevance of his approach appears with renewed clarity. In his measured interventions, one perceives both the desire for a “long-distance” dialogue across temporal ruptures—between different languages, materials, and techniques—and the readiness to employ formal analogies, aimed at a readable mending rather than at the erasure of scars. Scars which, in the case of Döllgast’s projects, stand as testimony to the most unsettling historical events that led to the crisis of modernity.
