Shoddy Construction at Construction Ministry
April 26, 2004
German building codes are strict; houses here are usually built to last.
Usually.
However, the prize-winning annex built by Germany's Construction and Transport Ministry, the country's final authority on building codes, is falling apart. Employees there keep an army of buckets on hand to catch water from dripping ceilings, are watching cracks grow like weeds in walls and ceilings and avoid touching metal window frames for fear of electric shock.
Now those employees will have to be relocated while the annex is rebuilt to the tune of millions of euros.
The five-year-old annex in central Berlin was designed by Swiss architect Max Dudler. The 23,000 square-meter, six-story cube sheathed in gray granite houses more then 300 civil servants who work for the ministry.
"It's a beautiful building. I'm not at fault," said Dudler in a telephone interview with Bloomberg from his offices in Zurich, adding that he was "astonished" at the number of complaints about the building.
But the ministry's head, Manfred Stolpe, is feeling a slightly different emotion -- anger. He's mulling a lawsuit against Dudler and the builder, Stuttgart-based Züblin AG. The ministry rejects that it played any roll in the sorry state of the building, saying it had "an information deficit" during construction.
"In any case, we can't keep complete track of projects -- that's a science in itself," Karola Storck, a ministry spokeswoman, told Bloomberg.
Builder Züblin is viewing the lawsuit threat calmly, saying it's not liable to repairs on the lemon of a building since it carried out construction work according to specifications that government-appointed experts approved.
The debacle doesn't exactly do much to brighten up Minister Stolpe's fading star. He is already in the bad books of many for projects gone awry on his watch, such as the planned high-tech road toll system that has collapsed or the plan to rebuild the former East Germany, which has recently been categorized as a total and very expensive failure.