State Affair Architecture

The state builds for itself: functional and representative, exemplary and cost-efficient, technically advanced and at an internationally comparable level. Building administrations are often the pacemakers of technological, economic and typological progress and are at the same time suspected of bureaucratic overregulation. This was hardly any different 250 years ago than it is today.

The research project "State Affair Architecture. Von der preußischen Hochbauverwaltung zur Reichsbauverwaltung 1770-1933" (From the Prussian Building Administration to the Imperial Building Administration 1770-1933) brought together the latest positions on the subject of building administration at a conference last year and now in an exhibition and supplemented them with its own research. The guiding questions were: How does building administration function as part of the state administration? How does it find suitable employees? How must it be structured in order to be fast and budget-oriented? What is the relationship between continuity and modernisation?
The basis of the project and the exhibition is the rich archive fund of plans, prints and photographs, which appear in the presentation, conceived as a travelling exhibition, largely reproduced in original size. In the Architekturmuseum der TU Berlin alone, more than 15,000 objects have an administrative connection, whether as design tasks, as competitions and as graphic or photographic documentation. The abundance goes back to the long institutional connection between the building administration and its educational institutions: the Bauakademie and the Technische Hochschule became the Technische Universität Berlin.

This project was funded by the Federal Institute for Research on Building, Urban Affairs and Spatial Development on behalf of the Federal Ministry of Housing, Urban Affairs and Building with funds from the Zukunft Bau research funding programme. The BBSR is part of the Federal Office for Building and Regional Planning (BBR). It oversees major funding programmes and advises the Federal Government as a departmental research institution in the policy areas of urban and spatial development, urban development and sustainable construction, among others.

Opening on Monday, September 25, 2023 at 6 p.m. in the Federal Office of Building and Regional Planning
Street of June 17th 112
Speakers: Petra Wesseler, Hans-Dieter Nägelke, Christian Welzbacher