Designing for ‘James Bond’: An inside glimpse into the world’s largest intelligence fortress
By Margarita Delcheva
BERLIN — Officially open for business since February, Berlin’s new central intelligence headquarters, known locally as BND–Zentrale in the central Mitte district, is not hidden but has an actual street address at Chauseestrasse 96, where its two enormous gatehouses stand.
“The main task for BND is just information,” German architect Jan Kleihues said. “But all of that has something to do with — at least that’s what I thought — with James Bond, so I applied for this competition.”
Kleihues & Kleihues won the competition, which was open only to German architects due to the project’s high-security stakes. The award-winning architecture firm has a long reputation for a diverse variety of large-scale projects. Jan Kleihues’ father, Josef Paul Kleihues, is remembered for rebuilding the destroyed pavilions which bookend the Brandenburg Gate, as well as for designing the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago.
Thirty years after East Germany’s Stasi secret service was dissolved, a united Germany still has intelligence needs, especially in an age when governments compete to gather large stores of information. The formerly divided Berlin’s reputation as a Cold War espionage hotspot called for an attempt to reimagine intelligence architecturally. Jan Kleihues says he strived for visibility, security, and aesthetics when planning the new headquarters for the Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND), Germany’s equivalent of the CIA.
BND–Zentrale has helped move the agency from the outskirts of Münich to Germany’s capital. The new building cost $1.23 billion dollars and takes up 3 million sq. feet, including an area where the wall dividing the city used to stand. Construction on the complex, for which 20,000 tons of steel were used, began 12 years ago. BND–Zentrale is now the largest intelligence headquarters in the world, with the CIA’s mission control in Langley, Virginia, coming in second.
At the start of the project, his intelligence service clients showed Jan Kleihues “how security works, from zero to security Zone 3” in a structure resembling an onion. “When you build a building like this, there are two important things: security against terrorism as well as security against espionage,” Kleihues said. “You see 14,000 windows that look alike. They are not all alike in terms of function. They are very different. Some of them are just normal windows. Others are bulletproof.”
An air of secret service intrigue extended to the day-to-day drafting of architectural drawings.“We had to work in a secret office.The office was completely disconnected, in terms of web, from the rest of the world, ” Kleihues said. “Whenever we needed information in the office, let’s say for a door handle or a carpet, we had to go into a locked room. In this room you had two computers connected with the rest of the world.”
The architects had to record their search results on a physical disk to bring back. Information flow was only in one direction. Nothing from the planning room could go out the door.
The work on BND–Zentrale struck a balance between security and aesthetics, a significant challenge for the planners. One visually-arresting effect has been that the building’s façade changes color dramatically, depending on how sunlight illuminates it. “It looks very scary, very ‘bad’ because it is a dark, greenish, almost military-looking building,” Kleihues said, showing one photograph.
But then he pointed to a picture showing the building hued in coral light. “Then when you see this — it’s the same material but the sun is coming from a different direction. The building really changes extremely in the day, even in wintertime.” Its window covers, whether opened or closed, create grid patterns, adding texture to the monumental, mysterious, and physically unapproachable complex.
As an architect, Kleihues has his own role models when it comes to large-scale city planning. He approves of the legacy of the former city-planner Hans Stimmann who “prevented Berlin from becoming London, a destroyed city” where towers interrupt the architectural fabric. Kleihues warns that “with the wrong urban design, you can destroy a city forever.”
“We try to work with the urban fabric, not against it,” Kleihues said, describing his team’s approach. “We enjoy working within an urban context. Manhattan would be great. But maybe Manhattan is the wrong comparison because working within an urban context means that you want to realize a building within the urban fabric of a European city of the 19th century.”
Kleihues prefers to work in a fully “mature” city, where projects like his would be pertinent. “There might be a smaller left-over space and somehow you have to enter a building into that space,” Kleihues said. He wants to be mindful of “surroundings, dimension, composition.”
Kleihues contrasts his works to those of Frank Gehry, a Canadian-born American architect, famous for buildings that stand out with untraditional shapes. “Except for one example, you immediately see — this is a building by Frank Gehry,” Kleihues says. “You might not see that our buildings are by us because we are more into working with something, not against it.”
“In this case, it didn’t work,” Kleihues said, admitting the BND–Zentrale does not fully blend in. “We would have liked to work with the [surrounding] context,” he adds. Yet, security considerations curtailed how Kleihues and his team could work on the project. The building could not start from the sidewalk. A 300-meter field had to separate it from the street, preventing the shaping of street corners and obstructing the aesthetics of a “normal intersection.”
The building’s location and purpose served to move from “an aesthetic of the invisible” to “an aesthetic of the visible,” Kleihues argues in the essay he wrote for the building’s official architecture catalogue. Such approaches attempt to change the reputation of intelligence agencies, troublesome in recent German history and suspicious especially in developed nations during the information age.
There is no doubt that the gargantuan BND–Zentrale is visible. It has taken a significant bite out of Berlin’s denser city space. Many see the intelligence complex as a “fort,” which stands out more than it blends in and is not consistent with Berlin’s planning style — nor Kliehues’ professed philosophy. But Kleihues, in his writing, defends the colossus: “A fort has potential to fascinate.”
Margarita Delcheva is a UC Santa Barbara graduate student in Comparative Literature and a founding editor at Paperbag, an online poetry and art journal.
