Dhe architect Meinhard von Gerkan is dead. He died on Thursday in Hamburg at the age of 87. The office of the deceased informed the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. Von Gerkan is considered one of the most important contemporary German architects. Early on, his office community von Gerkan, Marg and Partners (gmp) created an architectural masterpiece with Berlin’s Tegel Airport, which opened in 1975. gmp then rose to become one of the largest German architects’ offices with around 600 employees at seven locations and has implemented more than 500 projects worldwide to date.
In addition to the airports in Berlin, Hamburg and Stuttgart, von Gerkan’s best-known buildings in Germany include the Berlin Central Station and the Christ Pavilion for Expo 2000, which is now in the Volkenroda Monastery.
Von Gerkan got involved in numerous Asian countries early on; Among other things, he designed the Hanoi Museum in Vietnam in the form of an inverted pyramid and supervised the construction and renovation of the Chinese National Museum in Beijing as well as the planning of the ideal city of Nanhui New City near Shanghai. With its numerous green areas and a large central lake, whose beaches von Gerkan once described as “endless Copacabana”, the planned city that has grown to 800,000 inhabitants is considered an example of exemplary urban development in the rapidly expanding metropolitan areas of Asia.
Born in 1935, von Gerkan also shaped the international architectural discourse as an author, critic and university lecturer at the Technical University of Braunschweig. In 2002 the Philipps University in Marburg and in 2005 the Chung Yuan Christian University awarded him honorary doctorates. In 2007, the School of Design at East China Normal University in Shanghai made von Gerkan an honorary professor, and since 2014 he has been an Advising Professor at Tongji University in Shanghai.
Von Gerkan was a co-founder of the Academy for Architectural Culture (aac), which is dedicated to the further education of young architects. For his work he was awarded the Building Culture Prize of the Association of German Architects BDA, the Federal Cross of Merit, the Liang Sicheng Prize of the Architectural Society of China and the Romanian State Prize.
“We were connected by the experiences of our generation: the horrors of the Second World War, the consequences of the Cold War, the division of Germany, the fall of the Wall, the gaining of unity and the European Union,” says gmp co-founder Volkwin Marg. “We had that Lucky to start in peacetime, living in a democracy. In terms of urban planning and architecture, we had the freedom to find answers to the questions of environmental design on a wide variety of levels. Meinhard von Gerkan’s creative thinking has survived, especially in the Academy for Architectural Culture, and will remain with us.”