BERLIN.- One of the mayor legacies of modernist architecture is the slogans that made it into the everyday thinking of people towards space. Everybody is familiar with “Less is more“ and “Form follows Function“. The linearity of these arguments is illusive. Life is more than one sentence and Architecture is too.

We would like to look again as there is also an other side in Modernism, a side of fancy forms, of irrational inventions, objects of surprising scale and presence. Many of these have already left our world, victims of even more rigorous policies of market economy and historical city models. Berlin specifically has to suffer the losses of Ahornblatt, Palast der Republik and the expressive facade of Centrum department store on Alexanderplatz, together with the integrity of the urbanist situation of the time. Especially the approach towards GDR modernism, which is up for revision, stands in a sharp contrast to the restaurative tendencies towards the built legacy of NAZI Germany.

Questioning this practice, raumlabor in collaboration with students from Bauhaus Universität Weimar will build a 1:2 replica of the canope of the “Haus der Elektroindustrie”, located on Alexanderplatz 1-5. The building material originates from the same period as the object replicated: doors taken from demolished apartments in Halle-Neustadt, one of the four mayor urban developments of the early GDR, now under transformation as a so-called “shrinking city”.

raumlaborberlin is a collective of architects, based in Berlin since 1999. In their work, raumlaborberlin seeks for new concepts for urban transformation, working in the fields of urban planning as the long-term perspective, linking this work to the field of direct action through interventions in public spaces.

Team “FREUND DER MODERNE, VORDACH”: Markus Bader, Andrea Hofmann, Christof Mayer raumlaborberlin, Projektmanagement: Manuel Rauwolf, Bauhaus Universität Weimar, Construction Team: Students of Bauhaus Universität Weimar.