To be seen on the photograph entitled Sieglar-96-09-21 is the so-called “Kaiserbau” on the airport autobahn A 59 between Cologne, the venerable cathedral city, and Bonn, the up-and-coming capital of West Germany at that time. In 1972, the Cologne tycoon Franz Kaiser, urban director Heinz-Bernward Gerhardus, mayor Josef Ludwig and a few other dignitaries were behind the construction of the largest and most luxurious hotel in West Germany. It had twenty floors and was 60 metres high, 74 metres long. It had more than 500 rooms, 1,200 beds and a swimming pool on the roof. Total cost: 45 million DM.

But it remained an uncompleted building that never housed a single person. For thirty years it was a contemporary non finito, the symbol of a utopia, a site of yearning, a memorial and an adventure-playground. After the German Action Artist HA Schult temporarily transformed the building in 1999 with photographic portraits of famous persons, it was demolished on 13 May 2001 and disappeared from the landscape.

Not without reason is the Biblical tale of the Tower of Babel (Gen. 11: 1-9) with its linguistic chaos one of the best-known narratives in the Old Testament, in spite of its brevity of only nine verses: God puts an end to the presumptuous construction project by sowing a confusion of languages which, because of insurmountable difficulties in mutual understanding, forces the project to be abandoned.

In spite of its dimensions, its massiveness and obtrusiveness, the Kaiserbau became part of the landscape over time. A patina of graffiti and moss caused it to merge with its surroundings in a certain sense. So already before being torn down, it had disappeared from general perception.

(Denise Essig, revised version)