The Earth, A Good Apartment

In 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 were 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 paintbox 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 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 Buddhist 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 individuals, 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...