Profile

In any case, the influences that help Barkow Leibinger's work achieve its special impact come from outside: from London, from America, from the Netherlands and from Switzerland. Which shows that global networking functions even where debates on national specificity seem to dominate. Barkow Leibinger can therefore be seen at the very least as a European firm, possibly even an international one.

For the uninitiated, it may seem peculiar that Barkow Leibinger built one of their key projects in the Swabian provinces, of all places, in the flat southern German countryside near Stuttgart. But it is no coincidence that this brand of European neo-modernism should manifest itself here: Regine Leibinger comes from one of the region's leading entrepreneurial clans, the Ditzingen-based family business Trumpf, which has been producing machine tools for industry and medicine since 1923. In the last three years alone, Trumpf commissioned Barkow Leibinger to build a brilliant new gatehouse with an audacious cantilevered roof (see A10 #19), a 'service centre', and a works canteen with its own auditorium – and all this just at the Ditzingen site. During the same period, they also built office and commercial premises, a number of homes, factories and multipurpose buildings, often in the tax-advantaged reaches of suburbia, whose commuter belt monotony was suddenly enhanced by Barkow Leibinger's crystalline structures.

Admittedly, my own favourite Barkow Leibinger work, the Trutec Building (2006) in Seoul, South Korea, is far from Europe and I haven't seen it with my own eyes. But this is of secondary importance as my main interest here is not the architecture and its concrete execution, but the idea. Barkow Leibinger responded to the 'Media City' context (and to the pretentious programme of the newly developed zone) with smart understatement: they erected a low-tech media facade consisting of glass elements mounted as slanting facets so that the surroundings are mirrored and refracted. Images of the urban setting are collected and merged into a new, distinct picture – in much the same way as Barkow Leibinger have combined influences from international architecture of recent decades to create a new, distinctive style.