The Earth, a Good Apartment

THE EARTH, A GOOD APARTMENT Ewan Forster and Christopher Heighes n August 2004, we were invited by the Hebbel-Theater (HAU) in Berlin, a city that neither of us knew, to develop a site-specific project for the theatre’s 2007 program. As theatremakers in search of architectural narratives, our eyes Iwere instinctively drawn to a series of multi-colored housing projects dotted around the southeastern corner of the city suburbs, the visionary world of the architect Bruno Taut and his most famous public housing scheme, the Hufeisen Siedlung (or “Horseshoe Estate”).1 Taut (1880–1938) was Weimar Berlin’s most productive architect, but he is still widely seen as the most unfairly neglected of the pioneers of expressionist architecture. His visionary approach to design—in which materials “speak,” colors resonate, and buildings organically adorn themselves—sets him apart from the luminaries of the modernist movement. A prolific publisher of architectural polemics, Taut most famously expressed his principles through the 1920 publication of Alpine Architecture, a volume of hand-drafted illustrations-cum-building manifesto written as an antidote to war. It imagined an epic communal building scheme for Europe, which would adorn the mountains of the Alps in crystalline forms and elaborate glass palaces. His experiments with form and color on the Hufeisen Siedlung in Berlin, begun in 1924, as well as his later public housing schemes elsewhere in the city, remain as important civic monuments to utopian structural design. The reunified city now allows us to appreciate fully the geographical extent of Taut’s Berlin building programs, his paint- box projects standing out as powerful symbols of pacifism and democracy. Although he primarily worked in the field of architecture, Taut always retained a fascination with theatrical experiments. His expressionist architectural drama Der Weltbaumeister, which he wrote in 1919, offers a glimpse of the extraordinary thought processes that underlie his building projects. Twenty-nine hand-drawn images depict the birth, disintegration, and rebirth of a “pure architectural form” that is created in the cosmos and finally falls to earth; it has challenged and confounded many attempts at its interpretation and production over the last ninety years. Described by Taut as an architectural symphony, its graphic complexity belies a simple architectural philosophy, namely that every atom of the world contains within it an irrepressible 18 PAJ 98 (2011), pp. 18–25. © 2011 Ewan Forster and Christopher Heighes Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/PAJJ_a_00034 by guest on 29 September 2021 tendency towards creation and self-adornment. It is out of this philosophy—drawn from the writings of Paul Scheerbart and John Ruskin, the teachings of the Bud- dhist Catechism, and the polemics of the radical association of artists known as the Arbeitsrat fur Kunst—that the striking forms of the Hufeisen Siedlung, its proportions, colors, volumes, and details emerged between 1925 and 1930. For the Hufeisen Project, we chose as a compositional starting point the period of Taut’s life when the rise of National Socialism in Germany necessitated a period of exile in Japan. The ancient principles of Japanese architecture that Taut studied during that time resonated profoundly with his own brand of modernism. His writings about the Imperial Villa at Katsura and the idea of an architect out of time and out of place suggested a tone and texture that might be particularly evocative for our production. In our early wanderings around the city of Berlin, while devising The Earth, A Good Apartment, it quickly became apparent that examining the role of the “outsider” in its many manifestations might be developed as a potential compositional device. It would allow us to consider in detail how the concepts of foreignness—of individu- als, objects, and ideas—help to disrupt or revitalize commonly held perceptions of a building or landscape. Was there a particularly English viewpoint that we might bring to this estate? Previous Forster and Heighes projects that had languished in the research and development phase began to reignite in our newfound research in Berlin’s Neukolln district. Our earlier projects on The Garden City Movement of Ebenezer Howard and the building programs of the New Towns Commission were both initiatives that informed, and were then in turn influenced by, the innovative housing projects developed in Berlin during the Weimar period.2 We chose to stage a series of profound encounters between our protagonist—“the Architect”—and strangers to make visible for an audience of the Hufeisen’s contemporary residents the lesser-known influences on Taut’s work. Taut identified a naturally formed pond as the focal point of his building, and it functioned also as a fulcrum for the Hufeisen Project. We sought to build a structure on the water that would act as a “viewing mechanism” on which actions, images, sound, and text could be presented. Rather than a conventional stage, following Taut, this was an architectonic construct that would enable direct interaction with the main elevations of the building, its roofscape, and individual balconies. The construct would enable both the monumental and more intimate, humane, aspects of the building and those who shaped it to be explored. At the same time the contained nature of the horseshoe shape allowed for processional opportunities across the space, practi- cal demonstrations, and projection both onto and of the building. Stranded on a floating bamboo platform with a phrasebook and a suitcase, our architect waited for a series of visitors who arrive and depart by boat, each of them helping to develop an incremental understanding of the material and spiritual world. FORSTER and HEIGHES / The Earth, a Good Apartment 19 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/PAJJ_a_00034 by guest on 29 September 2021 Top: Hufeisen Siedlung. View from the roof terrace. Bottom: Characteristic double front doors on the Hufeisen Siedlung. Photos: C. Heighes. 20 PAJ 98 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/PAJJ_a_00034 by guest on 29 September 2021 THE ARCHITECT AND THE NATURE PHILOSOPHER From the Performance Text: The architect sat up and looked around. Cormo- rants were diving for fish. Frogs were calling amongst the water lilies. He felt his sunburned face and wondered how long he had been sleeping. A boat approached the landing stage. Hunched at the oars was a fisherman, weary at the end of his day. “How long have you been a fisherman?” The man stopped and cleaned his knife on his apron, “Not a fisherman, a philosopher.” He handed the architect a fish. The architect stood transfixed, his hand quivering, staring deep into its glassy eye which glistened in the light of the lamp, “Great Eye, Sheer Eye. Universal, Eternal, Infinite. Take care that nothing trifling obscures your gaze.” The man laughed and cut the head from the fish. The stars came out and the frogs stopped their calling. They ate strips of fish together and talked until the sky turned from yellow to deep blue. The architect told tales of Rugen and the forests of Königsburg. The Nature Philosopher sang a song concerning the things of heaven. They drank sweet brown saki and made a temple out of fish bones. Paralleling the concentrated nature of the garden space enclosed by Taut’s building, we chose to present the architect’s journey and the people he met in the form of poetic narration spoken live from a specially constructed tori, a ceremonial gateway used in Japan to mark the entrance to the inner grounds of a shrine. The sense of intimacy and focus that Taut strove to design into the fabric of his building permitted a multiplicity of narrative and image-based threads to be presented. We imagined spectators might see an Ice Age glacier form the pond, or see Taut as a child measuring rainfall in a Königsberg forest, while on a balcony, characters from Scheerbart’s expressionist novel The Gray Cloth would debate about convalescent homes for retired aeronauts. Below them, a workhorse would receive newly forged shoes beneath a shifting projection of green and indigo stars falling to earth, inspired by Der Weltbaumeister. Working in collaboration with the UK-based design and communication company neutral (Tapio Snellman and Christian Grou), we digitally animated the architect’s original drawings to create the fluidly organic “architectural symphony” that Taut had imagined in 1919. Presented as four postludes projected onto a large screen sus- pended above the Hufeisen pond, and accompanied by a Berlin hand bell ensemble, the animations helped momentarily to combine the visionary imagination of the architect and the fabric of his most significant building. It marked Taut’s symbolic return to the Hufeisen and the first realization of Der Weltbaumeister in Berlin. To temper the rich saturated forms seen in the animations, we intersected the performance with short film interviews with Berliners associated with the building and its history—architects, political activists, teachers, and residents. Their voices echoed across the pond at dusk, combining with the presence of a lively child performer, in the role of a student from Humboldt’s progressive Einheit (unitary) education system of Taut’s time, drawing upon the beliefs of that system to frame the piece as pedagogic, offering spectators a space to meditate on the relationships among nature, architecture, and the city. FORSTER and HEIGHES / The Earth, a Good Apartment 21 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/PAJJ_a_00034 by guest on 29 September 2021 The allegorical nature of the narration was synchronized with a contradictory visual narrative, performed by four actors and the child, which showed the furnishing of a new Hufeisen apartment by an idealistic Weimar-era Social Democratic Party fam- ily.

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