The new building for the Bundesnachrichtendienst (Federal Intelligence Service) BND, in Berlin takes center stage in the exhibition. Besides the urban context and external appearance of this large-scale project, four Kunst-am-Bau projects (art on architecture) created for this building, are exhibited as well.
Kleihues + Kleihues is exhibiting architectural visualizations thus unpublished in Germany, which give an impression of how the project will look after completion in 2014. Three models supplement the renderings: two 1:1 details of the building (natural stone and aluminum) enabling a visual as well as textural feel for the facade. A site model illustrates the scale of the building and its urban context.
For the four art objects planned within the main building, concepts were selected from competitions. They correspond not only in regard to content and scale of the architecture, but also complement and enrich it in their own particular way. In the representative gateway a nearly twenty-meter-high steel sculpture by Stefan Sous will welcome visitors. With its archaic design, the sculpture interprets gravity and the importance of the work at the BND. In the almost one-hundred-meter-long footbridge between the two gatehouses and the main building, the artist duo Anette Haas and Friederike Tebbe installed a kind of picture gallery. The picture gallery is composed of monochromatic pictures strung together and provided with aliases and places from BND history. For the long elevations of the two atria, Antje Schiffers and Thomas Sprenger created huge wall paintings, responding to the structure of the architectural grid. Only in the distance, can they be perceived as an overall picture; at close range they appear as abstract drawings. And finally, on the terrace, facing the Pankepark, Ulrich Brüschke installed two artificial palm trees, twenty-three and twenty-six meters high. With irony, they fall into line with the landscape image of camouflaged antenna masts.
Through reserved architectural language, the new building establishes an appropriate frame for the artistic forms. “Art on architecture” demonstrates how two genres enrich each other, without losing their own autonomy.