The urban ethos of Hans Döllgast’s postwar reconstruction.

A Talk by Prof Maximilian Sternberg

Hans Döllgast’s reconstruction of the war damaged Alte Pinakothek art gallery in the 1950s has widely been recognised as a pioneering response to the repair of war damaged monuments. Among those who drew inspiration from Döllgast’s intervention are James Stirling, Aldo Rossi and more recently David Chipperfield and Eduardo Souto de Moura. The preservation and repair of the Pinakothek was deeply contested and Döllgast battled with planners, conservationists, curators and fellow architects, developing a bewildering range of possible solutions. Although Döllgast has been rightly praised for his economical interventions and his ability to thematise the process of repair, his reconstructions were far bolder acts of transformations than most realise. This lecture explores the design ethos which animated Döllgast’s proposals and interventions and how they formed part of his wider engagement with urban continuity and theatricality in Munich. While Döllgast developed a highly original approach to reconstruction, and one that was in one sense ahead of his time, he also synthesised currents of twentieth-century architecture that developed alongside more dominant strands of the modern movement.

Maximilian Sternberg is Professor of History and Theory of Architecture in the Architecture Department at Cambridge University and a Fellow of Pembroke College. He served as Honorary Secretary of the Society of Architectural Historians of Great Britain (2020-22). His research interests span the history of modern European architecture, modern architectural and urban history, and the history of architectural theory.

Max has published widely on twentieth architecture European architecture among other subjects, recent books include: Hans Döllgast: Reconstruction and Modernity (2026) and Rethinking Hans Döllgast (2025).

Hans Döllgast, Alte Pinakothek art gallery in Munich originally designed Leo von Klenze (1954). Proposal for the repair of the south façade following after damage it suffered in World War Two

Credit: Architekturmuseum der TUM

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