Max Dudler – Energy Buildings

Présentation de l'éditeur :

Within the context of an extensive programme of urban electrification in the 1920s, entirely new building typologies were developed: power plants, transformer substations and frequency converters that had to integrate into the standard peripheral block architecture while still exhibiting their industrial function. In Berlin, it was the Bewag company that controlled the distribution of energy and hence determined its architecture.

Since the late 1980s, Max Dudler builds for Bewag, now Vattenfall Europe AG. In 1987, he realized the transformer substation at Lützowplatz, followed by an office and residential bulding at the Gendarmenmarkt (the site of Germany’s first official power plant), and designs for a building ensemble on Zimmerstraße, the conversion of the substation Wilhelmsruh, and an administration building for Vattenfall in Cottbus, Lausatia. Dudlers buildings feature an idiosyncratic formal language that roots in the traditions of German rationalism, Berlin modernism and the Renaissance.
His abilities to highlight urban qualities while accentuating tensions with the existing urban surroundings are demonstrated in the publication at hand.