‘The bright edifice of community’: politics and performance in Hans Scharoun's Berlin Philharmonie

‘It was democracy that commissioned this project. If we had not been serious in deciding that our nation is resolved – as it says in our constitution – to create a new order for itself and establish a social state on the basis of free self-determination, this building would not have been conceived and completed in the way that it has been, a building whose reality […] symbolises what is new about our order, embodying the element of freedom and the desire that man should be at its centre.’