Max Bächer, Darmstadt
Known as chairman of architectural competition juries, author of many essays, eloquent lecturer, enthusiastic teacher, he is the man who lent the spirit of the architectural education at TU Darmstadt a face, for almost 30 years. Max Bächer represents a postwar generation creating a New World amidst the ruins of history. Set on the crossroads between a superseded nationalistic prewar architecture and young international modernity, two opposing movements, not only in Stuttgart, where Bächer studied. Being chosen for an academic year in the USA in 1949, Bächer met many of the emigrated architects such as Breuer, Gropius, Mendelsohn and Mies van der Rohe. He also visited Charles Eames and Frank Lloyd Wright and befriended Craig Alwood, among others. Aedes presents a cross section through Bächers works of five decades. Already his early buildings show the explicit willingness to regain the lost touch to international modernity. Picking up on new developments and blending them with characteristic features from a grown building tradition to a new unity. Especially his numerous, reward winning residential buildings demonstrate in their diversity the discussion of the location out of which each building develops to its unique appearance. Reminiscence of form and material are thereby means of integration and interpretation of the place. Typical of Bächer is the carefulness applied to the perceptable correspondence of the interior and exterior. The diverse appearance of Bächers buildings, many are protectet by the conservation act, equals the difference of the chosen places. His building at the river Rhine is uncomparable to the one at the Ammersee, just like the landscapes are. He asks his students to search for answers by looking at the surrounding instead of copying the going bestsellers and pushing global similarity by doing so. His latter works, especially his cemetary structures are distuinguished by means of a prominent silhouette and sculptural grandness. Quote: the only structure type, for which one can concern himself with monumentality, without having to excuse. Bächers structures resist a simple classification. They stand for themself and for him...
Speakers of the opening will be
Kristin Feireiss, Berlin,
Doris Weigel, Art Historian, Berlin
Max Bächer
