"The outer walls of our buildings are the inner walls of our cities". If we take this sentence to heart in our work, many things become clear: in the urban layout, the streets are the corridors, the squares are the rooms. They must be spatially defined, otherwise they remain only residual areas that cannot be perceived plastically. Our city functions like a floor plan without a ceiling. And just as a house with only corridors makes no sense, a city with only streets makes no sense. Every village needs a small square: a lime tree, a fountain, a little bench, an inn, a chapel.

A good city functions like a stage set for a play that is performed in the open air. It needs stairs, galleries, towers and portals, otherwise there is no spatial tension. Have you seen the ARD series Charité? Every episode features the staircase. That's where the characters in the series climb up and down. There are few things a director can use better to build tension and pace than a staircase. Schinkel was a stage painter before his breakthrough as an architect. There he learnt how scenery becomes dramaturgy. He passed it on to the next generations. Then came a generation for whom the word "scenery" took on a negative meaning. "Potemkin villages" and similar fighting terms did the rounds. If you went to the cinema, you could still see how set design worked in the films of the time, because they were shot in the open air.

One of the most terrible inventions of the 20th century, a century so rich in terrible inventions, is the terraced house. It was based on the idea that houses could be built with their shoulders or backs to the street. Before that, it was customary for every building to face the street. Just as it was indelicate at the table to give the lady next door the cold shoulder or to sit with your back to the person opposite, it was indelicate to build a building with its back to the street. Anyone who interprets our city's squares as rooms can hope that a little etiquette will set in. People sense this intuitively, because in places without an urban spatial quality, we have a particularly large number of people walking around in jogging bottoms. They think to themselves: "If the city has no etiquette, why should I have it?". If you interpret Odeonsplatz as Munich's parlour, it becomes clear why shops shouldn't sit there with flashing neon signs on their heads.

Today, every row of terraced houses has its back to the street. I call these views TKKG façades because they consist of a staircase, kitchen, loo and grille. In the half-timbered houses of the Middle Ages, it was not customary to have a toilet window facing the street. And the people of the time were certainly not squeamish about this. It made no sense because, firstly, glass was expensive and, secondly, in a society without a television, the street was the place where things happened. You got news and good deals from the street. People stayed at the front. The kitchen, the latrine, the pantry were at the back. You can see this very clearly at the Goethe House in Weimar.

When the plot of a Hollywood film shows us an attractive house, it always has the living room, dining room and bedroom at the front, with the kitchen, laundry room and "restrooms" at the back. I have an anthology of "American Dreamhomes" at home. I stole this book from my father as a child and leafed through it for hours. What did I learn from it? No building in it has a dining room, toilet or bathroom at the front. A house needs a very charming exterior to be able to tolerate toilet windows facing the street. Victorian terraced houses, which can be found everywhere in the English-speaking world, always have a bay window next to the entrance with a lounge. This makes the houses more friendly.

The façade is not something with "Potemkin villages", it is the stage backdrop for the drama of our society. It needs understanding and the will to realise this. Think of the "skene" of Greek theatre, where the stage set was a façade and the façade was a stage set. Think of Palladio's "Teatro Olimpico" and how scenery becomes architecture and vice versa. This has nothing to do with "superficiality" and "staffage". It is no coincidence that projects such as the Spanish Steps or St Mark's Square were created in Italy - the land of opera. If the doges of Venice and the cardinals of Rome had not known what a theatre was, no architect in the world could have persuaded them to create these squares.

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First published on Facebook on 31 January 2021