It is amazing how easily plans can be changed even in Germany if only the political will is there.
In Darmstadt, you could feel a touch of displeasure among the UNESCO experts with regard to the location and size of the planned visitor center for the Mathildenhöhe artists' colony.
And because people in the southern Hessian city have high hopes of being accepted into the circle of World Heritage Sites with the Art Nouveau ensemble, it was decided without further ado that the building would be erected a long way down the slope and thus outside the core zone.
On that occasion, the cubature was also significantly reduced.
Matthias Alexander
Deputy head of department in the features section.
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It is really not a shame about the original design by the currently particularly popular Marte.Marte office from Austria, it is one of those concrete-glass pavilions with a wide cantilevered flat roof that you can still get around with almost every competition jury in this country. What qualified the design to set the mood for a tour of outstanding buildings by architects of the century such as Joseph Maria Olbrich and Peter Behrens will always remain the jury's secret.
The plans for the visitor center show how ambivalent the world heritage status can be.
Because UNESCO assumes with justified self-confidence that the title it has awarded will lead to a sharp increase in the number of visitors, the applicants must submit a plan of how they intend to deal with the rush.
This, however, makes interventions in the appearance of the ensemble to be protected almost inevitable.
One could almost get the idea of wishing the Darmstadt application a failure so that the visitor center becomes superfluous.
Positive reports
A failure of the application, however, is considered unlikely in specialist circles. The application has been prepared very carefully and professionally by the city and the Hessian State Office for Monument Preservation, for example with symposia and expert hearings. Nor has it been forgotten to promote the cause among the citizens. As is now customary, the application documents have the size of a humanities habilitation thesis. Considerable sums are being invested in the renovation of the buildings, and Mathildenhöhe has been a construction site for a long time. Above all, there is one reason for the high expectations: the reports by the two foreign experts were very positive. Their importance in the world of the higher international monument diplomacy authorities can hardly be overestimated.
Darmstadt's application follows UNESCO's gap doctrine, according to which the western states, which are already overrepresented on the World Heritage List, should only be given a chance if the proposed sites represent regions, epochs or topics that have been neglected so far. While the architecture of classical modernism is well represented in Germany with the Bauhaus in Dessau, the Berlin housing estates and the two houses of Le Corbusier in the Stuttgart Weißenhofsiedlung, Darmstadt's proposal aims at the artistic and architectural departure into modernity between the turn of the century and the outbreak of the First World War.