German architect Juergen Mayer may be the “most fascinating hope for German architecture since the Bauhaus”

People keep calling Juergen Mayer a futurist. To him, architecture is just a long search for the limits of new materials and new structures

Architecture, the German architect Juergen Mayer believes, is about the future and about the environment: it reflects the present and the past, and it carries an ambition for what comes next.

Mayer took architecture degrees at the University of Stuttgart, Cooper Union and Princeton, then opened his own studio in Berlin in 1996. His first completed building was commissioned by the local government of Ostfildern, a suburb of Stuttgart; it was widely praised, and it gave his career a strong start. For the next two decades most of his clients came from the public sector — city governments, schools and the like. Across urban plans, buildings and public art installations, Mayer has kept working at the same question: how the human body, technology and nature fit together. His projects stand in Germany, Belgium, Spain, Denmark and the United States, and his work is held by the museums of modern art in New York and San Francisco.

Mayer has produced plenty of eye-catching buildings, and every one of them is structurally daring — which usually means they take much longer to build. He has described his own style as going “beyond chaos.” He is known for taut, tensed lines that carry an unrestrained imagination, and he is deeply interested in putting new technology to work in construction.

Bloomberg Businessweek once called him the most closely watched German architect since Walter Gropius and Mies van der Rohe. The independent magazine 032c called him “the most fascinating, great hope for German architecture since the Bauhaus movement.”

Mayer has been lucky. The turning point of his career came with the first design he ever won.

In 1998 he won the competition for the new city hall in Ostfildern. The building sits at the center of Scharnhauser Park, a former U.S. military base next to Stuttgart Airport, and it gathers under one roof a city hall, a public library, an art gallery, music rooms and a night school, an auditorium, offices, sports facilities.

What Mayer made is a large open public space that looks from outside like a sealed box and is remarkably transparent inside. Concrete and clear glass alternate through the interior according to what each part does, leaving the plan loose and flexible. Outside lies a broad public square, with the light installation Wind.Light on one side. Parts of the building stay open at night after city hall closes; people entering from the ground floor after dark pass under a huge cantilevered roof, where Mayer used computer-driven animation to produce the strange sensation of “light rain” — a small, technological link to nature and the weather outside.

After Ostfildern, more projects came.

In Ludwigsburg, Mayer built the private house Dupli, one of the key works of his “surrealist” architecture.

The house looks as though several volumes had been twisted together, each side taking a different shape. It is stacked out of half-open spaces that run between inside and outside, and its open-air swimming pool makes it seem to reach out of the hillside on one side and lean down to embrace the park lawn on the other.

OLS House, on a Stuttgart hillside, shows the same signature approach to a home. Its owners asked for something simple: a family of four wanted the house to take in more of the valley around it. Mayer strung the three floors together with a sculptural central staircase. The ground-floor entrance is fairly closed, holding a storeroom and a spa; the second floor, with living room, dining area and kitchen, opens up and gets moving. From the side the house looks as if it were opening its mouth toward the valley, and Mayer pulled the landscape indoors with full-height glass and a terrace.

He also built more technical and environmental thinking into OLS House. The structure is reinforced concrete, wrapped in an insulating composite skin of aluminum and glass, with anti-glare panels for sun protection. Every interior partition is drywall, pressed from gypsum and soft minerals — lighter, flatter and quicker to put up. The roof is aluminum-zinc-coated sheet, which needs no pretreatment or weathering, resists corrosion and heat better, and costs less.

In fact, after 2000 Mayer's designs drifted steadily toward flowing curves. Some call his buildings “something to do with the future”; others simply call them surrealist. The same broad style reached a wide public through Zaha Hadid, and gets called “blob structure” or “blobism” — though more often people never find the right word for it at all.

Mayer has a more practical explanation for the shift. “Computers made drawing easier,” he says, and with new materials coming along, things became easier to build. In other words, had the technology allowed it, his buildings might have looked this way from the start.

He has not stopped at houses. In public space, too, Mayer has pushed at what new materials and new structures can do.

In 2009, commissioned by Georgia's transport ministry, he built a highway rest stop on the corridor linking Azerbaijan and Turkey. The huge concrete form grows freely and irregularly and, with a glass curtain wall, also makes room for a supermarket, a farmers' market and craft exhibitions. The second phase of the Danfoss Universe science park in Denmark, finished in 2014, holds an exhibition hall and a restaurant in the middle of farmland. Its jagged outline stands out — as if a page had been torn straight from a comic book.

The Sarpi border checkpoint, completed in 2011, stands on the Black Sea frontier between Turkey and Georgia. Anyone riding the train from Turkey into Georgia is unlikely to forget this oddly shaped white building.

Before it went up, this remote stretch of coast had a small supermarket, a local produce market and a few cargo sheds. When the Georgian government came to Mayer, it wanted a building in this particular spot that would make people remember Georgia — that would show them Georgia is a beautiful country.

That sent Mayer thinking about Georgia's mountains and coast, its plains and the Caucasus range to the north. This rich, rugged terrain was his image of the country, and it became the source of his design. The finished checkpoint has an irregular cantilevered balcony used as a viewing deck, looking out over the water and the cliffs along the shore, and letting patrol officers keep a close eye on the border.

Besides the usual customs facilities, the second floor holds a cafeteria, staff rooms and meeting rooms. Mayer hoped the place could also host local weddings and other events, and give residents some feeling for it.

Under the futurist shell, what Mayer actually cares about is how structure can squeeze the most out of function. He describes his method this way: “We start from the qualities of a space and its organizational structure, and then we research construction methods and material choices.”

Between 2012 and 2017, FOM, Germany's largest private university, built a new learning center near a former train station in Düsseldorf. The striking thing about it is the staircases: irregular, even eccentric, they thread through the building and produce a peculiar beauty.

Eccentricity was never the point. Mayer's starting point was to shrink the space given over to stairs as far as possible, so that more than 2,100 students would get more usable floor area. To meet fire-escape rules he also worked more buffer zones into the façade, and the landings between flights turned, unexpectedly, into informal places to talk.

The eight giant pink X-shaped loungers in New York's Times Square are Mayer's most recent pleasure. Next to his free-flowing buildings they are simple things, but they are his new experiment in fusing the digital and physical worlds to create a different view of the city.

The loungers sit at the X-shaped crossing of Broadway and Seventh Avenue. Before the area was reborn in the 1990s, adult movie theaters and a red-light district were all anyone associated with it. Now Mayer uses the X to hint at what the neighborhood once was, and among the endlessly changing billboards around the square the loungers offer a slow moment away from the city's speed.

When the Times Square Alliance, which runs the square's cultural program, came to Mayer, it wanted a new sense of space for the busiest district in the world — so that people would not only know Times Square through the media but form their own memories of it. Mayer wondered what the square feels like from another angle: what if you looked up at it from below?

That became the idea behind the loungers. They let people lie down in the middle of the bustle and look up at a slightly different Times Square; four people can lie on one and talk, or even spend the night there.

“This has already become a new image of Times Square,” Mayer said. People love shooting the square from on top of the loungers and posting the pictures online; under the hashtag #TSqXXX, no fewer than 17,000 new photos go up every day. Tim Tompkins, president of the Times Square Alliance, has been pleased with how XXX has done, once saying that “XXX offers a clever, engaging way to bring a wholly new experience out of an old culture.”

Mayer never tires of testing new materials. “Innovation in construction methods plays a key role in our projects,” he has said, “and exploring the use of carbon-fiber materials in the future will be exciting.”

For the student canteen at the Karlsruhe University of Applied Sciences, he built the main structure out of polyurethane-coated timber. That became his material of choice later, when he designed the Metropol Parasol in Seville.

The Metropol Parasol is his best-known piece of public space. Starting from the site's history, Mayer and his team spent a long time on research, weighing what local residents actually needed against what new technology could do. The finished structure is 150 meters long and 70 meters wide, the largest wooden structure in the world today, standing in the middle of the city like an enormous parasol.

Mayer calls it “an exciting project.” In 2003 the Seville city government decided to redevelop a temporary parking lot at the very center of town, more than 30 years old, and put the job out to open tender. The city wanted to preserve the archaeological remains under the site, and at the same time to give the city a modern edge.

“How do you create a new center of urban vitality?” Mayer's thinking was very simple: “People always need a place to cool off in the shade.” He tried several geometries before settling on a polyurethane-coated timber grid, glued firmly together with a new adhesive into a fluid, streamlined structure. Working as if on a sculpture, he turned a vast wooden installation into a living space at the heart of the city.

Building it took seven full years. “Almost every step was difficult,” he says.

The timber came from Finland, was made into panels in Germany, then shipped to Spain for assembly. Earthquake and fire resistance were the main concerns, and holding the joints stable mattered just as much. For the engineers, installing the wood was the hardest part of the job. Mayer already knew the timber-bonding technology, but he still spent four weeks calculating the load on the entire roof, and he added two reinforced-concrete towers that let people climb up onto it — his way of breaking down the line between inside and outside.

The Metropol Parasol has become, as hoped, a new calling card for Seville; Lonely Planet even named it one of the best travel destinations of 2018. The light and shadow it throws down shift with the sun, so the place feels different every time. People like to linger under it, to rest or to hold events: new political parties have held their founding conventions there, and it has turned up in the backgrounds of music videos and in BMW and Mercedes-Benz commercials.

Mayer's studio now has 25 people and seven or eight projects going at once. Lately he has been watching prefabricated housing, and in 2016 he donated money to Revolution Precrafted. He goes on studying new technologies, materials and structures at his own unhurried pace; when he empties his head, he likes to listen to music and let ideas come out on their own.

His slow, laborious architecture will keep going, and fortunately he knows how to persuade a client to wait for a building. As he sees it, “designing with an eye on the future carries risk, but the payoff is great too.”

Images courtesy of: Juergen Mayer

About Design Republic · Design Festival: the event ran from March 16 to March 25, 2018. It set out to draw on the strength of the design community to reinterpret design's inclusiveness, its crossing of disciplines and its capacity for innovation. The festival built in the importance of “cross-disciplinary collaboration” and “community,” deepening Design Republic's character as a diverse, highly innovative platform that argues for bringing together the four basic elements of life — clothing, food, housing and mobility, and the culture around them — in search of a better way to live and communicate in the modern world.