Stephan Braunfels

Biography

Stephan Braunfels was born on August 1, 1950. He completed his studies at the Technical University of Munich in 1975 and established his office in Munich in 1978. He is a nephew of the composer Walter Braunfels.

Early career

Braunfels' first competition success along with his plans and critiques on urban design concepts for Munich formed the basis for the exhibition "Designs for Munich" shown in 1987 at the German Architecture Museum in Frankfurt am Main. As an advisor to the City of Dresden in 1991-1993, Braunfels designed a master plan for the reconstruction of the historic city centre of Dresden. Braunfels opened his Berlin office in 1996.

Pinakothek der Moderne

After the completion of his first projects in Munich and Dresden, Braunfels won several competitions. The first major competition he won was for Munich's Pinakothek der Moderne in 1992. This project took ten years to come to fruition and opened in late 2002 as one of the largest new museums in Germany. Braunfels garnered some prizes and lauding reviews for this building.

Peter Schjeldahl, reviewing the Pinakothek der Moderne in the New Yorker (January 13, 2003), wrote: "it is a big but self-effacing, "invisible" building: on the outside, a bland concrete-steel-and-glass shoebox; on the inside, a dream of subtly proportioned, shadowless, sugar-white galleries that branch off from an airy, three-story rotunda. In the effulgent atmosphere, you may know where the walls are only by where the pictures hang. I gratefully watched colors combust in Kirchners and Noldes under translucent, all-skylight ceilings. (I'll never again think of Expressionist color as generally sour and arbitrary.) On an ordinary rainy Tuesday in November, the place was thronged with people in festive spirits. The Moderne is a great success.

German parliament buildings

In 1994, Braunfels' design for the 81,000 square meter German Parliament office building -- Paul Löbe Haus—was awarded first prize. The home of German Parliament's offices and committee chambers opened in 2001 and is one of the most prominent structures in Berlin. In 1996 he was awarded first prize for another parliament building design, the 65,000 square meter Marie Elisabeth Lüders Haus, which houses the German Parliament's offices, library and repository. This second building opened to critical acclaim in 2003.

These three projects are considered to be some of the largest scale projects in post-Cold War Germany and have established Braunfels as an architectural force in Germany.

Completed

In progress

Awards and honors