Sehr Komplex

This rippled facade can be found at the bottom of a highrise on Krausenstrasse/Leipzigerstrasse in Mitte. The building is part of the Komplex Leipzigerstrasse, a series of tower blocks designed by Werner Strassenmeier and the Joachim Näther collective, which were built from 1969 onwards.  I assume there’s no immediate risk of it being removed, as the building has already been renovated once since the Wende. But you never know….

The Komplex buildings were formerly known as the ‘Springerdecker’, because were apparently built to obscure the news tickers on the top of the GSW building next door in the West, as well as the source of the news itself, the Axel Springer building. The architects subsequently denied that, however. The more flashy tower blocks on the northern side of the Komplex were used to accomodate foreign diplomats, western journalists and, of course, the Stasi.

The ground floor space behind this facade was formerly home to the marvellous Museum of Letters and is now occupied by a nursery. The rest of the building is primarily inhabited by East German pensioners and a few upwardly mobile types. I bet the former could tell the latter a tale or two.

Talkin’ ’bout a demolition

I’ve taken my time, but I’ve finally managed to post some pics of the demolition of the GDR’s Building Ministry/Ministerium für Bauwesen. For an idea of how the building looked before the wrecking ball arrived, see this post.

Brick by brick

It’s not a very exotic example of GDR design, but it’s interesting looking, and that’s reason enough for this wall to be included here. I like the fact that instead of simply piling the bricks ontop of each other, whoever designed it decided to arrange thems with gaps, making it less monolithic and more decorative. It’s just a wall behind a railway station, and they didn’t have to do it. But they did. You’ll find it on the time-capsule-esque Lichtenberg street mentioned in the post below.

Flower Power

I found these flower-shaped bricks on the entrance to a building in the  GDR-tastic Buchbergerstrasse (formerly Eckertstrasse/Oberweg) Lichtenberg. I can’t find any information about who designed them, but have seen the same design on other buildings.

The building dates from the 1980s and now home to the ‘Berlin Rockhaus’, which rents out rehearsal rooms to musicians. The interior was partially renovated in 2000, but a look at the Rockhaus website suggests that it still has a strong whiff of GDR about it. It’s probably worth checking out, as is the street, an industrial estate which backs onto Bahnhof Lichtenberg. It looks like it’s remained largely untouched (unsullied!) by developers since the Wende. My kind of place, then!

The statistics show….

…that if it’s East German public art, it’s probably not long for this world. This is a metal sculpture on the side of the condemned Haus der Statistik on Otto Braun Strasse.

It’s already been removed (see below). Which means you’ll have to make do with the pics above. Not really the same though, is it?

Mensch!

As promised, here are some images of Walter Womacka’s mural ‘Der Mensch dass Mass alle Dinge’ (Man, the measure of all things) being removed from the side of the Ministerium für Bauwesen in Breite Strasse last year.

The mural was mounted on the front of the building by Womacka and his students from the Kunsthochschule Weisensee (where he was rector) in 1968. It consisted of 350 copper panels covered in ceramic paint.

In summer 2010, Berlin city council announced that the building was due for demolition. It couldn’t find a home for Womacka’s mural (which is a whopping 15 x 6 metres) and was threatening to bin it, until WBM Mitte housing association stepped in at the last minute and agreed to cover the costs of removal and storage. It did so allegedly because Womacka had been one of its tenants since the mid-80s. WBM Mitte also owns the Haus des Lehrers on Alexanderplatz, which is decorated with Womacka’s iconic mosaic frieze, ‘Unsere Leben‘ (Our Life).

The mural was removed on 4th/5th October 2010. Each of the plates was taken off carefully and lowered down very unceremoniously in an Ikea bag. They were then packed into wooden crates. I expected an audience, but there was no one there, just me, a foreigner with a crap camera, snapping away. It was a bit of an undignified ending for the mural. However much of a stubborn old GDR apologist he was, I’m glad that Womacka didn’t live to see it happen.

The Womacka society had attached a series of posters to the surrounding fence, announcing the ‘Day of the Removal'(!) which included a biography and a list of his works already destroyed since the Wende, as well as the protected & endangered survivors. I was shocked to discover the relief on the Haus des Reisens on the list. No GDR era art, it seems, is safe, unless it’s already survived a renovation (see the mosaics on the Haus des Lehrers & Cafe Moskau).

Kunst am Bau

An exhibition documenting the work of Kunst am Bau, a GDR artists’ collective, opens in Dresden this Saturday. KaB worked on many of the large scale urban developments in East Germany and shaped public art across the country . Formed in 1958, the group consisted of painters,architects, graphic designers, and ceramists. They produced around 2,500 works in Dresden, Halle, Leipzig & Berlin, including mosaics, murals, sculptures, fountains, molded walls (including the distinctive rippled walls), structural walls & playground features.

Despite being dependent on state patronage and approval, the group didn’t really subscribe to the official Socialist Realist style & embraced more radical styles such as abstraction and cubism. The work was space-age, utopian and pretty outlandish. Have a look at the elephant pictured below, built from prefabricated components:

The group was dissolved in 1990.
In years following the Wende, many of their works were destroyed and/or fell into disrepair.
The KiB exhibition brings together some of the KiBs surviving works, removed from their original architectonic contexts, photos of the ones which didn’t survive, as well as documents relating to the state commissions, and reflects the renewed interest in the once discredited visual culture of the GDR.

The exhibition is in their former studios in southern Dresden and runs til the 25. Sept.

http://www.kunst-am-bau-ddr.de/ausstellung-2011.html

Schilling Times

This mosaic is located on the side of the entrance to Schillingstrasse 30.  The building is home to the ex-communist Solidarity Housing Association, which owns a lot of towerblocks in the area.

I’ve seen an identical mosaic on a building on the Strasse der Pariser Commune, so it must have been serially produced, a bit like the tower blocks themselves.

Window on the world

This building, the Krausenhof at 38-39 Krausenstrasse, in Mitte, isn’t GDR-era. The railing on its windows, however, are. Have a closer look.

The building was erected in 1911, but due to damage sustained in WW2, it was later partially re-clad by the East Germans, who must have also added the railings.

The Krausenhof is in the former Fleet Street of East Berlin, and the building has housed several East German newspaper companies. Interestingly, it was also formerly the main offices of the Landesdenkmalamt (Federal office for the preservation of monuments), but they’ve moved now, and the Krausenhof is currently empty.

Fortunately it’s old &  ideologically benign enough to be a protected building (perhaps the former occupants had a hand in that?), so even if the lovely railings get removed in a fit of Germanic ‘out with the old’ pique, the building aint going nowhere.

Empty lot next to Krausenhof. Probably not long for this world...

 

Zoo chic!

Check out the tiles (late 50s, early 60s) in the Tierpark’s Alfred Brehm Haus! Don’t they make you wish you were a bird or a wildcat?  Being enclosed in a tiny space and stared at by humans all day is but a small price to pay for living in such visually pleasing surroundings, no?