Star architect Eike Becker on German inner cities

Frankfurt In large American cities and in Asia, they often characterize the cityscape: skyscrapers. In Germany, on the other hand, these buildings are still comparatively rare. Because high-rise buildings do not have a good reputation with many people. Critics see them as energy guzzlers, elitist and soulless buildings.

But the Berlin star architect Eike Becker, whose office in Berlin is one of the top addresses for office and administration buildings in Germany, considers this a big mistake. “Cities need more high-rise buildings – and not fewer,” Becker told the Handelsblatt. “If we compare them to metropolises like Paris and London, we don’t use the available space enough.”

The advance is not without explosiveness. In most German cities, plans for new towers are controversial, sometimes bitterly discussed. The question of how many high-rise buildings German metropolises can tolerate has occupied the Germans for years and culminated in a referendum in Munich in 2004 against buildings that exceed the 100 meter mark.