German chancellor criticised for ‘obscene’ multimillion-euro office extension

When Berlin’s federal chancellery opened its doors 21 years ago — a maze of concrete walls and winter green doors, banisters and carpets — it was already the world’s largest government headquarters.

Situated diagonally opposite the Reichstag building in central Berlin, the chancellery is eight times larger than the White House, 10 times larger than 10 Downing Street and three times larger than the Élysée Palace in Paris.

Now it is about to get even larger as chancellor Olaf Scholz has given the mint green light for a new €777 million chancellery extension, doubling its floor space to 50,000 sq m.

After years of debate and controversial costings, the extension has come under fire as a decadent and untimely investment given how Berlin is bankrolling emergency aid packages nearing €300 billion.

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Government officials hit back, insisting the chancellor’s office urgently needs 400 additional office spaces and other facilities.

The original complex, by architects Axel Schultes and Charlotte Frank, was designed as a workplace for 450 people. Various changes in government business mean that nearly twice that number work in the building.

The six-storey extension will be located across the river Spree from the original chancellery and connected by a bridge.

Compared to the original costings from 2018, however, the new project approved last week by Mr Scholz and set to be completed by 2028 will be 86 per cent more expensive.

The federal auditor has already flagged the plans and costings as simultaneously extravagant and unrealistic, with further price rises likely.

A visual highlight will be a helicopter landing pad on a 23-metre platform, costing €15 million, and a kindergarten with 15 child spaces costing €2.8 million, or €187,000 per child — about triple the usual cost.

The latter was too much for the auditor and, in its report, it demanded the chancellery work with local Berlin authorities to find a cheaper childcare alternative.

The auditor demanded, too, that the extension lose its planned winter garden to cost €14 million, for which it saw “no added value”.

A new chancellor apartment with a 250 sq m floor place will be decorated at a cost of €225,000.

All in all, the auditor delivered a damning verdict on the original plans, suggesting square metre cost corresponded less to a “sobre, functional building” and more to high-end research facilities.

“Such buildings have a much more complex building technology, high-security laboratories, clean rooms and elaborate, airtight facades,” said the auditor. It queried the €18,000 per sq m cost of the chancellery extension which has none of these special requirements.

“To counter the particularly high cost risk,” the federal audit office added, it requested “close controlling from and regular information to the Bundestag budget committee”.

News broke last week that preparatory work will begin on December 28th on the site with the felling of 200 trees, some 60 years old.

Among the critical voices, Focus magazine said “the building, with its ecological and financial side effects, was already pompous before the war, energy price explosion and XXL inflation”.

“Now,” it suggested, “the project seems obscene.”