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Influential German architect Meinhard von Gerkan passes away aged 87

2022-12-05T19:11:00-05:00

One of the more prominent modern German architects of his time is being mourned after news that von Gerkan, Marg + Partners co-founder Meinhard von Gerkan died last week at the age of 87.

Born in Latvia in 1935, von Gerkan grew up in Hamburg after being orphaned in World War II. Following the completion of his studies at the Technical University of Braunschweig, von Gerkan opened the practice known today as gmp with his classmate and business partner Volkwin Marg in 1965. The firm won its first mainstream success with the completion of the beloved (now decommissioned) Berlin Tegel Airport design in 1974 and went on to grow into one of the country’s largest practices, with over 600 staffers and offices in Hamburg, Berlin, Aachen, Shanghai, Shenzhen, Beijing, and Hanoi.

Tegel Airport in 2017. Image courtesy Wikimedia Commons user Matti Blume (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Further projects for the Estádio Nacional de Brasília, reconstructed Olimpiyskiy National Sports Complex, and Leipziger Messe (whic...

Berlin's $6 billion airport drama

2015-07-28T15:22:00-04:00

The architecture and engineering teams fought to keep up. As the terminal ballooned from 200,000 to 340,000 square meters (dwarfing Frankfurt’s 240,000 and just shy of Heathrow Terminal 5’s 353,000), they parceled out the work to seven contractors. That soon grew to 35, and they brought in hundreds of subcontractors, says Delius. [...] At the very moment Merkel and her allies are hectoring the Greeks about their profligacy, the airport’s cost, borne by taxpayers, has tripled to €5.4 billion.

Starchitect Trio: The Men Behind Germany's Building Debacles

2013-06-17T16:43:00-04:00

SPIEGEL: Mr. de Meuron, Mr. von Gerkan and Mr. Ingenhoven, architecture's reputation in this country is worse than ever. How much of the blame do you bear?

Stuttgart's train station, Hamburg's concert house and Berlin's airport: Three projects in Germany are currently competing to be seen as the country's most disastrous. SPIEGEL spoke to the star architects behind the construction sites.

Our questions are critical....

2011-04-13T23:13:04-04:00

Gerkan: This idea of only wanting to work for private individuals is absurd. In a country like China, where does private end and where does government-owned begin? Private citizens turn out to be aligned with the government, or a private developer obtains government financing for his building. For architects like us, this is almost impossible to figure out. Many of those who criticize us are building the five-hundredth high-rise building in China and claim to have integrity. This is a fallacy.

Within two days of the opening of the first exhibition at the newly renovated National Museum of China, Chinese artist Ai Weiwei was arrested at the Beijing airport. Der Spiegel recently spoke with Meinhard von Gerkan of the renowned architecture firm gmp in Hamburg, who designed the renovations. Their discussion focuses on the morality of building in modern China. Particularly for a project wherein the government is patron and the site is as historic and politicized as Tiananmen Square.