By Gunnar Schupelius
Bad planning or incorrect planning make public buildings unaffordable. The government has lost control and is still planning happily, says Gunnar Schupelius.
On Thursday, Senator for Building Andreas Geisel (SPD) announced that the renovation of the Komische Oper would cost 437.4 million euros. This is only an estimate, it could be more expensive if the auditorium from 1892 is more dilapidated than expected.
Geisel issued this message at the request of the BZ, not on his own. Maybe he wanted to hold back the bad news. So far, the renovation of the opera was calculated at 227 million euros, now it is said that the rising construction costs and the “concretization of the plans” have led to the increase to almost double the amount.
That may be the case, but if that is the case, a new plan is needed. The Komische Oper is not only to be renovated, but also rebuilt and expanded. This is what the design of an architect’s office with the difficult to read name “kadawittfeldarchitektur” envisages, which won the competition two years ago and received 160,000 euros in prize money for this alone.
The plans envisage, among other things, adding another box to the box-shaped exterior of the opera, plus a huge foyer facing Unter den Linden, etc.
As always, in this case the architects did not give any thought to what the realization of their ideas would actually cost. They didn’t have to, because there was no price cap as a requirement in the competition. “We’ll let this beacon of culture cost us something,” argued the culture senate.
But times have changed, and dramatically so. In the middle of the worst economic crisis of the post-war period, Berlin wants to rebuild an opera house for half a billion euros. This is completely absurd.
This money is simply not there and if it were there, imagine how much art and culture could be financed with it, it should never be dumped in just one opera house. In times like ours you have to rethink. At best, the existing building can be repaired, nothing more.
We have to find our way back to the roots: an opera consists of two spaces, namely the stage and the auditorium, with the orchestra pit in between. That’s all and the opera doesn’t get better or fuller by giving it half a billion euros.
It’s the same with the airport. Basically, it doesn’t need much more than a hall, runways and a runway. Nevertheless, the BER is known to have cost almost eight billion euros.
The Federal Chancellery, which is to double its size for 777 (!) million euros, has also gotten completely out of hand, simply so that more civil servants can sit at their desks.
Such prices are out of this world. Bad planning or incorrect planning make public buildings absolutely unaffordable. The government has lost control and is still planning happily.
We have to think much more simply again and give the contract to those architects who are willing to do it. No more digging billions – our taxes are not play money!
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