It takes 12 hours to fly from Frankfurt to Hanoi, and Bernhard Franken is getting to know the route very well. Franken has a half-dozen projects in Vietnam. If his struggling Frankfurt practice has an angel looking out for it, she comes from the East. With startling speed, the German economy has turned sluggish and dyspeptic. Architects from Berlin to Bonn say small practices are shutting down or on life support. Larger ones are shedding staff, and Foster + Partners just closed its Berlin office.
“We can’t survive by working in Germany alone,” Franken says. “Practices have to be more specialized and globalized at the same time.” A chance meeting through a friend led Franken to a pitch his firm’s services to a Vietnamese real-estate concern working on a large, multiuse project called Tan Lab Green City in the coastal city of Nhâ Trân. Winning that project led to four others in Vietnam last year, and Franken soon opened a Hanoi office.
