ARNO BRANDLHUBER with Nile Greenberg 

Arno Brandlhuber’s cooperative practice b+, based in Berlin, is a degree zero of contemporary architecture. Their work often reduces a building to the forces which it’s most affected by—not function or structure, but rather regulation, financialization, and the management of a climate. This produces spectacular results such as San Gimignano Lichtenberg, built from an abandoned construction site’s concrete tower. Their project Antivilla delivers a satisfying aesthetic clarity, hammering its windows through an existing workshop building. Underlying these projects is a hard-won skillset of governance, economics, and democratic reform-making. Their democratic reforms such as HouseEurope! look to change EU policy around financing renovation and other important measures. In this interview, Arno gives consideration to the biggest questions of our moment.

Nile Greenberg (Rail): I have a question about functionalism. In the modern era (ca. 1800–1950), architects made things more functional to improve productivity: in factories, healthcare facilities, house and domestic settings. People still view an architect today in this way.

But now, architects produce value rather than productivity: providing square footage, reducing maintenance costs, low construction costs, high-performance façades, and flexible interior space. How do you see function in your work?

Arno Brandlhuber: If you add a scale larger than architecture, you have more than the object itself. That has been my main topic in recent years: how architecture’s production chain feeds into CO₂ emissions and global warming. The building sector produces around 38% of global CO₂ emissions. That is the function I am interested in—how to operate within that framework and reduce the number. My main shift was from new construction to adaptive reuse, because most of the energy is already embedded in the existing building.

Rail: Great example. An architect is thinking not just about a building, but everything around it: CO₂ emissions, property value, and regulation.

Brandlhuber: The image—the object at the end—does not interest me much. The ecological and economic questions do, and I spend a lot of time on them. I ask a lot about the building itself, the structure I find, and less about the investor, whether that is me or somebody else.

What is an existing building good for? If it is a church, it will probably not become housing. Then the question is how to get to a usable space the easiest way, one that still complies with accessibility, fire codes, the rest of it.

Rail: To many people, this is not what an architect does. The common idea is that architects are given a use: we need a house, we need media offices. The architect thinks about the best design for that use, combines it with the conditions of the site and the budget, and then they make a building.

You operate in a new way for architects to work; you might first find a building or a site, and then try to imagine and design an appropriate use. What is an architect today?

Brandlhuber: Architects are maybe like coal miners. Some still work the old way, but they are the last ones.

We are a highly professionalized cleaning practice. An abandoned industrial site, or whatever situation you find: it is about cleaning. And you know you will have to clean again in some years, so it is also about forecasting.

The situation where the architect waits until the object is done and then disappears is ending. You stay with a building now, and you adapt it, and adapt it again.

It is also about entrepreneurship, and mostly younger architects will build that up. A real market will open between those who know a lot about buildings, their structures and strategies, and those who deal with money and use. It means engaging with the building over a much longer term.

Rail: You renovated a church in Berlin, St. Agnes, into a gallery. As a historic building, it needs to preserve the past and be able to be restored back to its original state sometime in the future. Your intervention is awkwardly situated in the present. You make a plan for how to use the building today, make a plan to preserve its past, and establish how it can be “cleaned” again in the future.

Architecture is dealing with time in a strange way, materially speculating about the future.

Brandlhuber: The Catholic Church wanted to get rid of one of three emptying churches in Berlin, and St. Agnes was regarded as the ugliest one. They wanted to demolish it; we managed to get it listed as a postwar Brutalist building. Then they leased it out for ninety-nine years, because the Catholic Church has existed for two thousand years and thinks it may need the building again one day.

What could it become? I asked around, and two people were interested: the collector Axel Haubrok and the gallerist Johann König. It was rather simple. Galleries no longer need, or even want, this white-cube thinking. We removed everything unnecessary—cleaning, as mentioned—and installed one giant removable floor, as a concrete table on its own legs. Churches are cold; this table brought everything—heating, the technical infrastructure, and the main gallery space. You couldn’t use the walls for hanging for reasons related to the listing, but you could hang from above, and the table was stable enough to support heavy loads.

The most astonishing thing was this: the church was built so that you lift your view up to heaven. But the new floor sits at the level of the mezzanine for the choir and the organ. With that as the main exhibition space, your view goes down instead of horizontally, perfect for viewing art, because you’ve been lifted.

We built the table in the style of the original architect, Werner Düttmann, a very good architect. There is a historical debate about revealing the layers of addition so you can differentiate the new from the old. We argued the other way: give it ten or twenty years, and everybody will recognize this building as a great exhibition space by its original architect Düttmann.

Rail: Right. The “table” is what you’re calling this first floor not touching the walls, but standing on its own foundation. It can be removed in the future and the church restored.

Brandlhuber: I like helping a situation become something else with minimal intervention. We could have made it housing, but that would have meant destroying it completely, because then you need all the windows. It could have become a pawnshop or a supermarket for sex toys, but that would not have been appropriate to the former use.

Rail: I want to reiterate how different an approach this is. Not only did you landmark the building, you also found a use, an owner, and redesigned it to disappear.

Brandlhuber: That is how things come together. All the other spaces around it became schools and offices, smaller ones. And certain stories stay within a place and remain active, no matter what you do to the building. Call it architecting instead of authoring.

Rail: I want to return to functionalism. Often, the very buildings which were built with specific purposes and programs are the ones that no longer have any value today and risk demolition.

Brandlhuber: First, think of all the hygienic questions that came with functionalism. Surfaces were carried around the corners so they were easy to clean in everyday maintenance. But these glued and composite materials aren’t easy to clean during a real cleaning.

Then look at a building’s time horizons: plumbing twenty or twenty-five years, electrical and façade on their own cycles, but the structure much longer. Functionalism never really followed these timelines. There were a few attempts, but you could never easily change a climate system or a piping system—normally it sits behind shafts. It was about having the right temperature, not being able to change what makes the temperature.

Rail: That’s my analysis of architecture right now, at least in Europe and North America. Those were advantages in terms of productivity: fewer people cleaning each room every day, cleaning a rounded surface instead of terracotta ornament, reducing a building’s daily costs. Now we’re not looking at productivity, but instead at value. As buildings become real estate instruments rather than productivity instruments, there is an interest in how a building functions over a fifty-year timeline.

Brandlhuber: In the end, this whole complex of money is tied less to the building. It is tied to the ground. And since we no longer produce ground, ground is becoming a very rare asset.

Imagine a building built thirty-five years ago. The ground value was maybe a tenth or a fifth of what it is now. In the system we’ve built, to revalue the ground again and again, you have to demolish. If you ask a bank to finance a new build, the process is very clear. Ask the same bank to finance the same amount for a renovation, and they will charge you a higher rate. Why? Because there’s logic behind it: a new build has no risks, only opportunity, and the old has risks. It comes structurally from a model of permanent infinite growth.

Rail: When did you start seeing this in your own career and in some cases, taking advantage of it for your architecture?

Brandlhuber: Brunnenstrasse was an abandoned plot with a ruin on it and a concrete basement full of water. At the back, there was a gallery run by artists, as the owner of that house had also studied art. He sold me the land at the base value of the time, in a bad situation, minus the basement removal costs. Removing a basement is the most expensive thing, because the pressure can make the neighboring buildings collapse.

So I went to the bank with a guarantee: I take on the basement, you finance the rest at one hundred percent. Then you can rent it out at a price low enough that your friends can all move in. I kept an open book—this is what I paid, this is what I owe the bank for interest charges, these are the energy costs, and I make no profit. You stay ten years, no profit. And they all came, 032c and the galleries, because it was very cheap.

Rail: You sometimes act as the architect and sometimes as a developer, which obviously became very empowering for you.

Brandlhuber: When I did Brunnenstrasse, I had no interesting commissions. It starts simply: you look at a plot, think about what to do with it, and work out how to finance it.

Scaling is the thing. Right now we are trying to take over an old animal-testing facility in Berlin, an investment of thirty or forty million euros. But it is always the same three rules. Do it as simply as possible. Make it something you would want to live in or use yourself, not something for somebody else. And keep it cheap enough that your friends can move in. You can’t start in an overheated market. If the ground is too expensive, there is no project.

Rail: This feels like a strategy we all could learn from: make it as simple as possible, design it for yourself, keep it affordable.

Brandlhuber: There was also a competition for a temporary art hall at Humboldthafen, by the main station. At the same time, I found an underground squash center, built in the 1980s as the unfinished basement of a sports hotel. Eight meters deep, perfect concrete, owned by the city, lying there as a ruin for thirty years. So we proposed not a temporary hall but a permanent one, for the same money. Same logic as Brunnenstrasse: ground value in a bad situation, minus the removal costs. The jury agreed and took it to the Senate. Some weeks later we heard: “Oh no, we sold it four weeks ago.”

This was around 2008. It turned out the city was selling everything—their schools, their ground, everything. Galleries and artist spaces were moving further and further out of the center, because interim use of empty public buildings had stopped working. So I told the artists: stop complaining; make real-estate policy. That evening, with Leonie Baumann, who ran the Weissensee Academy of Art, and two others, we founded an initiative called Stadt Neudenken, “Re-thinking the City.”

Before the election, we asked every party leader in Berlin: would you change the selling-off of public property? They all said no, or maybe in the future. Not the left, not the right, not the liberals, not the conservatives were up for a yes. So we said: in a representative democracy, if nobody is addressing your interests, you are not represented.

We mixed all the party colors together, and it came out a very nasty brown (RGB 165/96/36, CMYK 14/40/80/20). Posters everywhere, people using the color as their screensaver. That is what it is about—making a project, making images, making it visible in the city. In the end, the policy collapsed: the Liegenschaftsfonds, the Senate entity that sold the properties, was stopped.

Rail: So this democratic reform worked in the end. Incredibly, it reminds me of hearing about the International Congresses of Modern Architecture (CIAM) or the Japanese Metabolists. Obviously the campaign helped, but can I assume there was also a larger shift in Berlin at the time? A lot was changing.

Brandlhuber: At its height, maybe six hundred people were giving one or two days a week to the campaign. Then the newspapers came in, and the topic became clear. I wouldn’t claim this works at the scale of a country, but Berlin is a city-state, and it worked here. It taught me a lot about the frameworks around architecture, and why certain things become possible, and others don’t.

Rail: Let’s talk about Berlin a little. You moved there around 2006?

Brandlhuber: Somewhere around there.

Rail: A lot has happened since then culturally: huge cultural exports, big influence in media, fashion, design, and art. I’m curious about your experience within that milieu. You’ve collaborated with, and shared communities and projects with many people.

Brandlhuber: After reunification, everybody wanted to go to Berlin, but it didn’t turn out to be so easy, and a lot of things didn’t work out—apart from the club scene, which developed very fast in the nineties. Until 2005 at the latest, it was a very cheap city in rent and in living costs, so there was a huge migration of young foreigners, which was great. With a small grant from somewhere, you could live on almost nothing. It was very open—the city itself, because of its conditions, and the spaces inside it.

That shifted dramatically. Now we have “normalized” prices. When Lehman Brothers came down in 2008, the disaster was clear, but there was a little hope that the counter-economies Berlin was built on—sharing, dividing, cooperation—would have their golden age. They did not. We had a mayor, Klaus Wowereit, who said Berlin is poor but sexy.

Then it became less poor. People found out you could buy real estate here rather cheaply, and they all came. That ran together with the privatization that had happened before: the selling off of public property. The city had sold hundreds of thousands of apartments en bloc for nearly nothing. Whoever bought in, BlackRock or anyone else, wanted to make money. That is their business. But it shifted the whole situation, even with legislation that offered certain protections. The social housing program ran out completely—there was no money; the city itself was poor. The real estate went into other hands, and with it came what you could call the normalization of capital-driven segregation.


Rail: I’m interested in financialization, especially in terms of your practice. But I’m also interested in the artistic setting and how your practice works in relation to it: film, media, documentaries. Did you find yourself learning from all these other people?

Brandlhuber: Yes, for sure, especially from artists, sculptors, painters, photographers, filmmakers. It was a second education, and effective, because it was co-production: exhibitions, galleries, setting things up. You help them, they help you. Later, lawyers and some cool financial managers taught me.

Brunnenstrasse was the first architectural intervention aligned with the cultural sphere. They all came, even people I did not know; 032c wanted to be in the building. That was 2010, and everything was still cheap. Berlin then was stone-clad, critical reconstruction, Hans Kollhoff and the rest. For our building we took everything—the neighboring heights, the light into the backyard, all the information—just not the façade material, and we kept the costs simple. The first image of its kind, because architecture was normally expensive, not part of the cultural production of the present. It always lagged behind.

Public policy came next, and that was the start of legislating architecture: lawmaking as a field of design. Why complain and say, “But it is the codes?” We made the film Legislating Architecture with Christopher Roth. At ETH Zurich I had a chair, and we built the whole program around film—no longer the object frozen at the moment it is finished, but the process; film is time-based.

Filmmaking brought us back to legislation, this time not with the activist attitude we had in Berlin, but at the EU level. There is an instrument called the European Citizens’ Initiative: a million signatures across Europe, and your proposal goes to the European Commission. That is where HouseEurope! comes from—a non-profit policy and advocacy lab, pushing for a value shift in the building sector, socially, ecologically and economically.

Rail: You’re describing it as the first representation of this new Berlin in architecture. What do you think initially attracted all these artists and cultural producers to Brunnenstrasse?

Brandlhuber: It was an image no longer based on stone Berlin, the thousand-year dynasty. Things stripped down, or left unbuilt. You can do whatever you like—nobody complains if you drill a hole in raw concrete. It is not Tadao Ando concrete. The gallery was open, with a program about what is going on in real life. They had a huge door covered in posters; you cut through it, flip it inward, and the street comes in.

There was co-living, with Sam Chermayeff and others. And 032c financed their business by throwing a party every month, huge, the stairs full. It was that up-and-down of a cultural, hedonistic, productive environment.

More or less completely accessible.

Rail: For me, Brunnenstrasse is a degree zero of architecture in the current context. Most people associate degree zero with Ludwig Mies van der Rohe—pure structure, minimum envelope. But I see how Brunnenstrasse is built from this moment: legislation, rules, and financing—instruments that aren’t the pure architectural things we usually think of. These new actors are what is pure in that project. The roofline, the gate, the stairs—everything is explained through the expression of these forces.

Brandlhuber: But listen to the wording. “Pure” meant not caring for the surroundings. It was a construction: standing on its own, without regard for what is around it, socially, ecologically, economically.

Rail: I did describe it as pure, but in context it’s so compromised. The front is different from the back, the left from the right. But when it’s explained, it’s the direct or “pure” result of these forces, these rules—the requirements of both the building code and the financing.

Brandlhuber: The construct of the image, too. You build it once, and the image goes on working for years without you.

Rail: There’s a lot of desire in the images of your work. Do you feel there’s something inherently chic about everything you make, even though it’s described without any of those principles? Antivilla and these other projects attract creatives and artists from all around the world.

Brandlhuber: That desire comes from the cleaning—heavy, radical. We clean a ruin or whatever it is, stripped as far as it will go while it still performs.

Rail: The images of Antivilla are particularly powerful.

Brandlhuber: Especially in the image. Antivilla was a simple one: a ruin, or a cave.

There is a film from 1973, Themroc, with no language, only sound. It ends in a kind of cannibalism towards state power, but also with collective utopia, the whole city breaking holes in their walls and moving back into caves. So the decision—if there is a good view, we smash it out with our friends—does not come from nowhere. It could have gone the other way, with Gordon Matta-Clark, and we would have cut. Which cleaning tool you choose is a decision we are very aware of.

Rail: A lot of people I know, especially in New York, really love your work, and some of them say, “I could do that too, except I don’t live in Berlin.” How can this approach operate within other contexts and governances?

Brandlhuber: One example. A house in Los Angeles from 1921, where Kurt Cobain and Courtney Love lived in 1992 and ’93—one of the rare ones they rented. People still restage every photograph ever taken there. Arthur Jafa bought it, which is interesting enough in itself. He reached out to us: “I heard you can deal with ghosts. You could be the one to get rid of ours.”

We researched the legal situation with American colleagues. The house turned out to be a meter too big—sitting on the lot, but over the line where you are allowed to build. One meter smaller, and you would be allowed two times the house on the same ground. So we made a model, took a bandsaw and cut that meter away, straight through the pillow of Kurt and Courtney’s bed.

The piece goes on a truck to Burning Man or anywhere else, carrying the ghosts as a bar or whatever—it is a balloon-frame house, easy to mount. We close the cut with polycarbonate, something translucent, so the light comes in and the image changes. And it enters the market of ground value: if you can build another volume of the same size, the ground is valued. I like chains of argumentation where there is no doubt left.

You start by getting the ghosts out, and the legal framework gives you the key, somewhere in the mud. It works at 20,000 or 100,000 square meters too. Look at the Tate Modern.

Rail: I always point people to your project for Midway Contemporary Art in Minneapolis and tell them: see, you can do it here. They did it themselves, and now they’re expanding. It really is the feeling of making space for your friends and for yourself.

Brandlhuber: Minneapolis was the same: buy an old parking garage. The question is how to scale it, since the authorities don’t make it easy. After the first phase, they wanted to double the space, and they had half the money. Copy the building next door? So we said: slice it, build half.

Rail: One question is about the history of your kind of thinking in architecture. I think you've found an alignment with Frei Otto’s Ökohaus [Eco-House]. He imagined an architect not being a form generator.

Brandlhuber: An outstanding project, even inside Frei Otto’s own work. He was a lightweight-construction man: the German Pavilion in Montreal in ’67, the Olympics in Munich in ’72. Then he was invited to a building exhibition in Berlin and came up with Ökohaus, which is Le Corbusier’s Maison Dom-Ino gone crazy, or James Wines’s Highrise of Homes—a shelf where people house themselves on stacked plots. He meant it as public infrastructure, like bridges or streets.

Rail: He really meant architecture as infrastructure.

Brandlhuber: The city would give leaseholds to the people on each floor, so that the public multiplies its ground through infrastructure. At first he went for a high-rise. The building director found him freaky and gave him a smaller plot, where he could not build as high, more hidden behind trees.

After Brunnenstrasse, I became a father, and I thought: where would I go? I made a list, and Frei Otto was at the top, for exactly that reason. Then a former student told me something was free. I went, and I took the leasehold for one unit over. And of course we cleaned it.

Rail: The same way people originally bought into it: you buy a concrete pad, and then you have to design your unit on the shelf.

Brandlhuber: Frei Otto demanded a lot of ecological features—winter gardens, greywater management—and not many people could manage that, in knowledge, money, or in time. Those who managed and stayed are deeply involved in the community. Once a year there is a summer festival, and the old structural engineers, green planners and friends come back to see what is going on.

Rail: See, now you’re a historic preservationist!

Brandlhuber: Yes. I would put it under preservation too, but in a way that lets people keep changing their units, because that was Frei Otto’s basic idea: inside the envelope, you do whatever you like. Lacaton & Vassal were big readers of Frei Otto, so the line is clear. I feel very close to them.

Rail: More extreme. I don’t know much about your history as an architect. Who did you look up to as a young architect?

Brandlhuber: When I started, there was a decision to make: postmodernism, or Rem Koolhaas. I was on Rem’s side, for the thinking, especially the early projects. Then I did a competition with Günter Zamp Kelp of Haus-Rucker-Co. He couldn’t afford to pay us young architects, so we became partners, and my first building was the Neanderthal Museum with him and Julius Krauss.

At the same time, I had bought a cave. We had heard at a party in Paris about a village in the countryside with houses where they had dug limestone out of the hill to build the front. We asked our friends for around five thousand euros, and each one got a key to co-use. Take it like that; I even learned from the cavemen.

I only ever worked as an employee for one architect, Helmut Richter in Vienna. After four months, I told him I had to go and do my own thing, that I should not be working for somebody else. He was yelling at me in the office. Later we had dinner, and he asked how much money I needed to start. He lent me enough for the next half year, and I built up my own office.

That was a learning experience for me. So many offices have come out of our shared offices, and they are all doing well.

Rail: It’s very important to be a generator for one another, the next generation especially.