BERLIN IS MANY CITIES. The architect and urban planner Werner Düttmann
Seminar at the UdK Berlin, weekly with excursions into the city
Winter semester 2020/2021
The seminar is a contribution to inquiry-based learning on the occasion of Werner Düttmann’s 100th birthday next year. Werner Düttmann is one of the most important architects of Berlin’s post-war modernism. The course will set out to explore his buildings in these times of pandemic. Among other things, an exhibition will be held at BHROX bauhaus reuse with the results.
The seminar will take place at the Chair of Architectural History + Theory at the UdK Berlin, Prof. Dr. Matthias Noell, in cooperation with Robert K. Huber (BHROX).
“Abolition of hysteria – planning and realization of a de-ideologized, i.e. factual and thus human togetherness of East and West or North and South or young and old.”
Werner Düttmann, 1968
Content
Werner Düttmann is one of the most important architects of post-war Berlin. Since the 1950s, he was involved in significant buildings and major planning measures in western Berlin; among his best-known and typologically most innovative are the Academy of Arts on Hanseatenweg, the Brücke Museum in Dahlem, and the Church of St. Agnes in Kreuzberg, which can now no longer be experienced in its original spatial structure due to reconstruction. Düttmann was also active as an urban planner, Senate Building Director and, last but not least, as President of the Academy of the Arts. Much of his work, however, involved housing construction in the form of reconstruction in the immediate postwar period, mass housing and large housing estates, urban gap filling, and, of course, smaller freestanding apartment buildings and row houses. Werner Düttmann can be considered one of the most important architects in the search for a new and appropriate form of housing in this era.
The course of Architectural History + Theory sets out to explore his buildings in the times of the pandemic. As far as possible, in real time, in the presence of the originals – and in cooperation with the Berlin institutions – or in a digital seminar.
Results
As a result of the students’ work, two exhibition formats and one publication format are planned:
L – Exhibition presentation, AdK Berlin, 06 March 2021.
M – exhibition, BHROX bauhaus reuse
S – documentation in the series of gray literature “-+-.” at the UdK Berlin.
“We should not hesitate to do what is ours. We should hesitate.”
Werner Düttmann, 1976
Winter semester 2020/2021
History of Architecture + Theory of Architecture
Berlin University of the Arts
Prof. Dr. Matthias Noell + Robert K. Huber
Tutors: Henrike Heuer and Sarah Herfurth
On the further activities at BHROX bauhaus reuse in the context of the 100th anniversary of Werner Düttmann’s birth … more