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 wereI 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

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 family. The audience heard that a cherry tree was to be planted as they saw a domestic lamp stand arrive; fish were described being gutted as bottles of beer were seen being opened. This deliberate compositional counterpoint, whereby the audience heard one thing but at the same time saw another, sought to create an energizing sense of “slippage” and disorientation in performance that enabled us to explore how Taut himself reconciled his mystical nature with the practicalities of providing modern public housing in Berlin.

The Architect and the Pedagogue

From the Performance Text: When the boat was pulled up on the shingle beach beside him, the architect dreamt he heard the grinding of the glaciers at Roseg and Grindlewald. When the woman unpacked her equipment beside him, he dreamt he heard the skiers on the Wetterhorn breaking the ice from their boots and laughing in the alpine sun. . . . A searing pain stabbed at his eye and he held his head and cried. The woman gently held his head and carefully pulled a splinter from his eye. The pain vanished and he sang in relief, “The Spheres, The Circles, The Wheels!” Unpacking an augur from its case the woman drilled a borehole through the ice and deep into the soil below. The architect watched her, “What kind of a scientist are you?” “Not a scientist, a pedagogue.” . . . Leaving him to practice his ecstatic steps, the pedagogue gathered her equipment and pushed her boat into the icy water. Seeing her go, the architect ran to her and pleaded with her to teach him more. She smiled and handed him the stones she had found. The architect looked in wonder at the stones in his hand as the pedagogue rowed out into the darkness. Turquoise, Opal, Beryl, Serpentine, Jet, and Ironstone. The stones looked back at him and he thought he heard them speak, “We are the organs of the Divinity Earth—you hovel architects must first become artists! Build! Build Us! We wish to become beautiful through the human spirit! Build the Universal Architecture!”

TheHufeisen Siedlung was the first low-cost housing scheme of Weimar Berlin spon- sored by trade unions. With Taut as architect and Martin Wagner as chief engineer, the project was Taut’s first opportunity to experiment and compose with color on a scale unimaginable in the rest of the city. Color for Taut was not mere decoration, it was a construction material in its own right. On the Hufeisen Siedlung, the palette embraces the location’s original forest setting and the temperate extremes of Berlin’s climate. The thousand apartments and family dwellings are all part of a carefully considered overall composition, optimistic and empowering. As a contemporary journalist put it when the project was completed, “although these houses alone do not bring happiness, they do invite one to be happy.”

It was Taut’s wish to build a society open to people’s view and to give citizens a clear insight into their own community. Intent on developing this principle ourselves, we

22  PAJ 98

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/PAJJ_a_00034 by guest on 29 September 2021 Top: The Earth, a Good Apartment. The architect (Tobia Dutschke) sketches his master plan. Bottom: The moon-viewing platform. Photos: Georg Knoll.

FORSTER and HEIGHES / The Earth, a Good Apartment  23

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/PAJJ_a_00034 by guest on 29 September 2021 embarked on a strategy of on-site enquiry (interviews, documentary research, spatial exploration, monitoring of use) to develop a performance-based “occasion” that would actively engage residents and other visitors to the estate. The tightly curved form of the Hufeisen Siedlung assisted in this process of collective re-examination. The apartments face in upon each other, with the occupants’ lives unconsciously reflected back upon themselves. A shifting band of light illuminates each balcony as the sun moves from east to west, the pond reflects the sky and every entrance way and route across the garden space can be observed. It is a benign communal vision, yet one that is very alive and fluid, giving the Hufeisen a particular atmosphere of expectation—a sacred space, where ordinary and extraordinary things can happen.

The challenge of the site was to respond to the rhythmical arrangement of the main Hufeisen building and Taut’s imaginative use of color, texture, and architectural accenting to create a performance language of equal variety that would help the spectator to “read” the building and engage with it in the highly sensory way that Taut and his expressionist colleagues imagined. We sought to actively re-learn the building, exploring the tension between contemporary reality and the utopia that Taut imagined, between real existence and idealistic impulse that we staged through the juxtapositions within the piece. Central to this was an understanding of the Hufeisen’s relationship to nature and the mechanisms Taut used to bind his building into the surroundings. The project demonstrated Taut’s belief that the lives of people could be transformed through an imaginative synthesis of human, aesthetic, functional, and constructive elements.

The Architect and the “Einheit” Child

From the Performance Text: The architect sat and stared out across the water, his eyes dazzled by the reflection of the morning sun. In the distance a sail appeared on the horizon. A pure white sail set against an azure sky. The breeze blew, the sail billowed and the boat approached the shore, announcing itself in a single word, “Einheit.” The boat approached the quay but the architect saw no man on board, instead at the tiller, bright eyed and with a face of salt and spray, a small boy. . . . The Einheit Child handed the architect a tree its roots carefully wrapped in sackcloth, its leaves dull and limp from the journey. He handed the architect a book, a story book, thumbed and marked from many readings. He handed the architect a pair of shoes, leather shoes, scuffed and down at heel. . . . The Einheit Child put the shoes on the architect and whispered in his ear, “The Radiant Shoes of Fortune!” . . . The Einheit Child sang a song to himself as he unwrapped the roots of the tree and planted it deep in the dark soil. He gave the architect a drink from his flask and the tree burst forth into summer fruit its ripe cherries drum- ming the earth as they fell from its branches. The Einheit Child ate his fill and spat the cherry stones from his mouth. Where they landed seedlings sprang up in elegant avenues that burst into blossom. Clutching his book the Einheit Child trimmed his sail to a wind that would carry him into the crimson afternoon.

24  PAJ 98

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/PAJJ_a_00034 by guest on 29 September 2021 Because he concentrated on public housing, Taut’s work was ignored for many years, and he was critically dismissed as an architect of “little people’s happiness,” his work labeled “homemade” and of no significance outside of Berlin. Fortunately, opinions have now changed; yet the intimate, domestic nature of his work is still undervalued. Taut’s simple, modest floor plans and generally unadorned exteriors allow the buildings to speak for themselves; they are humane, and thus in a sense very liberating. His rational use of materials and aesthetic application of color, texture, and detail fuse to create spaces where people can live unhindered, fruitful lives; they are emancipated through architecture. Unhindered by poor conditions or bad design, people’s homes become mini-theatrical stages, places of “life-reform,” where people can act out their lives more effectively.

At a time when Berlin is struggling to imagine a new ethics of architecture as it rapidly constructs the new monuments befitting its status as a leading European capital, it is perhaps pertinent to highlight the fact that dotted throughout the city, and now emerging in newly restored colors, the estates of Bruno Taut and Martin Wagner offer a clarity and sincerity of design from which all cities can learn. It is a measure of the quality of Taut’s designs that the Hufeisen Siedlung is currently under consideration by UNESCO as a World Heritage Site. In a subtler, but no less significant, way, our piece, The Earth, A Good Apartment, put to the test the Siedlung’s capacity for the nurture of creativity, community, and civility, as we cel- ebrated through a series of carefully constructed artistic interventions the character, narrative, musicality, and choreography of a suburban housing estate.

NOTES

1. Within European usage, the term estate is used to refer to public housing projects. 2. The Garden City movement was an early twentieth-century initiative for building new towns in open countryside rather than letting cities grow outwards. Ebenezer Howard started the movement at Welwyn and Letchworth, but his ideas were more successfully adopted in Europe and Germany, in particular.

EWAN FORSTER and CHRISTOPHER HEIGHES are theatremakers based in London. Since 1993, when the partnership was formed, they have created a series of unusual site-specific theatre events examining buildings of architectural significance or neglect. Current projects include explorations of the former Inland Revenue Building in Somerset House, London and the derelict Hover Port at Pegwell Bay in Ramsgate. Forster and Heighes are Creative Fellows at the University of Roehampton. (www.forster-heighes .org.uk)

FORSTER and HEIGHES / The Earth, a Good Apartment  25

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/PAJJ_a_00034 by guest on 29 September 2021