The Column. Eike Becker: "About quitting and beginning"

The Column. Eike Becker: "About quitting and beginning"

The invitation to a lecture on modular construction brought me back to my place of study, Aachen, after three decades. The evening before, I took a scooter and drove from the house with my former student room through the city center to the Reiff Museum, the architecture faculty. I drove past parks, squares and churches that I didn’t pay attention to as a teenager. I saw the city and today's students on the streets and in the bars like an out-of-time observer of my former teenage life. In retrospect. Lived, gone, not correctable.

In December, Richard Rogers passed away. A hero of my youth. To work for him, I moved to London. By then he had already built the Centre Pompidou and Lloyds Bank. Oversized, modern, fossil-fuel machines. Built fanfares of a revolutionary generation. I got to know him as the leader of a group of humorous individualists, as a baroque appearance, colorfully dressed, nonchalant, enthusiastic and inspiring. A dyslectic fast talker, charismatic and passionate, who loved life and loved people. His heroes were Mies, Eames and Wright, his friends and competitors also Norman and Renzo.

In the summer he invited the members of his office to his home. There I could admire his high-tech furnishings and the ten Mao portraits by Andy Warhol. Three decades ago, they almost passed as left-wing, socially minded sentiments.

In his Reith Lectures, broadcasted on BBC radio, he fought to reclaim the Thames Embankment and talked about the importance of such public spaces to society and about how the city belongs to the people and cannot be left to capital alone when it comes to creating quality of life. For this, too, the Queen knighted him. Later he became a lord and then a baron. He has won everything from the Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale to the Pritzker Prize.

In London, I was in my twenties and he was about the same age as I am today. This coincidence throws some questions at me that make me pause in my run. What do I still want to accomplish, given my own finitude? What traces will I leave behind? Who would I like to recognize in myself at the end of my life?

Modernity has declared life infinite and banished death from our daily striving. People only talk about it when it is too late for those concerned. I myself have rarely dealt with the end of my life, the end of my creative power. In my circle of friends, I also don't know anybody who has already accepted this natural challenge and would think their life from the end.

This is also true of society as a whole. Here, too, people just keep on working. Radical changes of direction are not foreseen in the system.

Far too rarely does a review of learned strategies and familiar beliefs take place. Even the fundamental principles of our present are seldom and tentatively questioned. In conversations, I am struck again and again by how widespread the assumption is that things will simply go on as they are: Democracy, capitalism, the good life for some, the distribution of poverty and wealth, health and disease, limitless growth. The status quo is simply perpetuated and many think it will continue as it is today, only better. Or only worse, depending on temperament. Even catastrophic events and developments barely lead to radical rethinking. The familiar little house that we have comfortably carpentered together over the years is too tempting. And the great foreign ‘continent’ that lies ahead of us is too threatening and fraught with loss.

But simply tinkering faster, higher, further is a questionable recipe for success from the 20th century. More sales do not equal more prosperity. Boundless growth, more trade and more consumption do not lead to happy lives, and simply building more does not lead to better cities. The planet is more fragile than we had hoped and fossil resources are finite. So are our individual lives.

The point is to invite finitude into everyday life, in its presence in order to examine the normality we are used to. We need to learn to say goodbye from ways of life and habits because, from today's perspective, they effect exactly the opposite of why they actually came into being and are no longer suitable for the 21st century.

We have to change the way we manage, act, plan, build and produce in order to ensure a good life for future generations.

Simply looking out for ourselves, enjoying our remaining time, planning beautiful houses and then the deluge? That's not enough. 

At the end of the day, I want to be able to say that I have not made or supported any decisions that will impair the development of people today and in the future.

I want to be able to say that I helped build just and livable cities. I have changed my lifestyle so that I do business for the common good, am climate-neutral and have adapted my mobility to the changed requirements.

I am writing this column on the Sunday after New Year's Eve. I can still smell the gun smoke, hear the thunder of the arms and see the exploding rockets above the roof terrace with the good view. Explosives from nearby Poland have provided impressive fireworks, despite a local ban on sales.

We said goodbye to the second epidemic year and started 2022 full of hopes. Cheers to the imminent end of the pandemic, to a new German government and to a policy that takes a firm stance against the climate catastrophe. And to the advancement of digitization, to a policy that addresses the housing shortage and strengthens urban centers as well as to a policy that achieves a turnaround in transportation. Cheers to a female federal construction minister and new construction directors in Berlin and Munich. 

Our small party society took pleasure in writing the individual farewells to what one wants to leave behind on small pieces of paper. And then to burn them.

Saying goodbye to the habit of quickly getting on a plane for a meeting. Saying goodbye to the idea that everyone always has to sit at the round table in order to make good progress. To say goodbye to the way we feed ourselves. And thus to say goodbye to an agriculture and forestry that has led to environmental poisoning and species extinction. And an industrial animal husbandry with unimaginable tortures in the stables.

I also took the opportunity to say goodbye to the heroes of my youth, Pierre Brice, Bernhard Grzimek, Diego Maradona and Richard Rogers. And, because things were going so well at the time, also to my youth itself. Very late, I suspect, but I'm still practicing.