Starting collaboration in the mid-1990s and formally founded in 2000, Despang Architekten is a refined design practice located in Hannover and Munich / Germany and Lincoln Nebraska / USA. Recently joined by Cynthia Despang and Isabel Schlüpmann in Munich, founding principals Martin and Günther Despang, both graduates from the University of Hannover, work in the tradition of the mid-nineteenth century established "Hannover School of Architecture", which was early in defining typological and tectonical innovation by “thinking globally and acting locally. The school’s director, Professor Konrad Wilhelm Haase, was seeking a deeper truth and authenticity instead of surfaced style. Beginning with “bohemian/bourgeois” clients, he quickly identified a “proletarian” objective for his architecture, in serving the average people as a public audience rather than the privileged individual.
We see an extended need in that regard in our time, where it does not lack the species of “high” architecture, which has always been and will be in existence. This used to be in the form of clerical and feudal typologies like churches and castles in the past and now existing as commercial, corporate ones like banks and insurance companies. Museums seem to be the presumably everlasting, extraordinary type. But different than in history, where there was always also provided a reasonable minimum standard quality of spatial and formal articulation as For the ordinary, average “low” architectural realm; we see this, to a dangerous degree, missing in our every day environment. Architecture in general has been downgraded as a common value on a priority scale ranking and it’s formerly number one position as the primary cultural expression has been taken over by the ephemeral idioms of a mobile fun and leisure society.
We don’t want to be thought of as sociological moralists, but we decided early on not to accept this. We believe in the impact of architecture on the mental and physical well being and in the potential of architects working to make people’s lives better in their profane every day environments. These are simple places/spaces where one grows up, in kindergarten and school and where one socializes in the neighborhood and buys food around the block or waits for the public train to ride downtown. We see it as a potential and as our responsibility to deal with such places and spaces, which have the power to positively shape the circumstances for a person’s attitude towards a better life.
The fact is that having a better life demands a healthier planet to live on, this allows us to be increasingly self aware and proactive towards the ecological aspects of our design. Typologically this also provides the opportunity to revise and optimize former prototypes. For example, our most current 2007 kindergarten allows the children to consciously grow up in the best possible emission-free environment. We see it as a challenge, to utilize the global movement towards a livable planet. After decades of avant-gardization and, in part, self-stigmatization of environmentally sensitive design, we try hard this time to approach it in a symbiotic “eco- and archi-friendly” way.
In this regard our work is mainly publicly accessible, and highly addresses societal issues. The traditional philosophically driven virtues of “truth and authenticity” are contemporarily influenced by the given difficult truth of extremely low budgets for both our public and private projects. The precise and comprehensive selection and application of tectonics and materiality as fundamental, pragmatic, and poetic design tools become, therefore, essential survival instruments.
We guess this is why the chair of the jury of the 2004 Lower Saxony States Award, which was given to the neighborhood grocery center in Marienwerder, Germany, called Despang Architekten “street fighter’s of Architecture”, who peacefully “fight the lack of meaning of the contemporary average environment”. Encouraged by this, rather than limiting ourselves and getting accustomed to a convenient building type, we believe that there are too many different types around which need care, so we try to get involved in as many of them as possible.
Therefore one could characterize our work by the categories of typology or materiality. Instead we believe it is represented best by the way that it was approached: by time and in seeking for types “in need” and of interest for us, one after another, as an ongoing investigative process.