Sauerbruch Hutton

Matthias Sauerbruch and Louisa Hutton have built some of the most striking modern buildings in Europe. On the occasion of an exhibition of their work at the Akademie der Künste in Berlin alongside work from an astonishing archive featuring work by Scharoun, the Taut Brothers and many others, Tim spoke to them about their work and the history that forms it.

 

Podcast transcript

Tim Abrahams: Superurbanists! Louisa Hutton worked for the Smithson’s back in the day and Matthias Sauerbruch worked for OMA. In 1989, though, that important year of 1989, when the wall came down, they formed their practice in London, but moved soon after to Berlin. And have since then worked in that city. Becoming part of it and using its condition to think through and beyond to the wider Europe. Their latest exhibition Draw love build locates them within a particular kind of German modernism. Rigorously intellectual self-confident, but also unafraid of a relationship with a real, rather than an abstract public, they build bridges. They’re playful. 

Anyone who visited Berlin in the late 1990s and early noughties would remember their high rise offices for the largest housing association in the city GSW. It was a promise of an architecture equal to that historic moment with a scale and generosity of modernism, which emerged on both sides of the wall, open and colorful, responsive. For a change.

Sadly for Berlin, that moment was not fully delivered on for reasons which are perhaps too tiresome and complicated to go in. Now, although when I visited Berlin recently and saw their wonderful copper clad wooden framed upper extension for the Berlin Metropolitan School , I remembered that moment. 

A wonderful celebration of the architectural legacy of this city, not just an ancient history, but a 20th century one, and I saw their exhibition too. Now this is a slightly complex scenario. There are a few things merging together within this exhibition, but I’ll leave them to explain it. There’s also loads of great stuff in there. Pay attention. Oh, one thing, the opening image they described as by that great pioneer of post-war German architecture. Hans Scharoun. You’ll be hearing more about him. 

Louisa Hutton: Three years ago in Mestre actually on the mainland to Venice, we did an exhibition that was a retrospective of our work called Draw, Love, Build, which are three mottos that we use to describe the interlocking themes that we use in every project. 

Matthias Sauerbruch: The Academy of Fine Arts, is something like the Royal Academy, it has a program director and he happened to be in Venice and saw the exhibition and he was very excited and said, you have to bring this to Berlin and and the Academy has these two buildings this one by Werner Dittmann, a sort of German brutalist, if you like which are much loved. There’s another one at Pariser Platz at the Brandenburg Gate but anyway, these have exhibition spaces and we were very excited to work with them.

Be invited to show here, but we felt you can’t just take this exhibition and plonk it somewhere else, 

Louisa Hutton: notwithstanding the fact that we would extend it because three years had passed. So there would be additional projects, we would maybe edit out other projects, et cetera, but we decided that we needed to look through the archives.

Matthias Sauerbruch: Because this is really one of the great assets of this institution that he has a fantastic archive which was started in 1945 approximately by Hans Scharoun he used to be the director of this academy for a few years. There’s a section called Baukunst sort of building architecture basically. 

Tim Abrahams: And he was in charge of the Baukunst. 

Matthias Sauerbruch: Exactly. And at that time there was no Baukunst archive. And also, of course. the city was divided and so was the academy. And whatever there was in terms of Archive, it was in the east. So West Berlin founded its own archive and Scharoun being the first director, so to say, overseeing this invited critics, say all his friends.

Louisa Hutton: Talented friends. 

Matthias Sauerbruch: It ended up being representatives In Germany, we describe as organic modernity. Hugo Herring, in particular, Scharoun the Taut brothers, the Luckhardt Brothers various other architects whose drawings you’ll find in the exhibition.

 if you look at how modern architecture has been represented in archives across the world, there’s the Museum of Modern Art with the Mies Museum, There’s obviously the various foundations, Le Corbusier Foundation, Alvar Aalto Foundation, and so on and so forth. And in that family of locations for modern architecture, this one stands for this particularly German, modernity. 

Tim Abrahams: So you’re having a dialogue between your work and the Académie de Kunst. 

Matthias Sauerbruch: The archives. Exactly, and Obviously this archive is vast, and to fully understand and fathom its depth would have been totally impossible.

So, you could critically say,, we were just basically going by instinct. What are these fantastic drawings? Oh, look at this. Isn’t this great? And so on. And in a way, we were accumulating pieces that we found fascinating. That has 

Louisa Hutton: some resonance for us. And it’s not as if we’re trying to say we’re standing on the shoulders of Scharoun, we’re as great as Scharoun. That’s not That’s the aim of the exhibition. It’s really to find resonance between what the architects were doing a hundred or fifty years ago and what we’re doing. So it was really looking at the problems that were facing them in the cities, the rebuilding of Berlin after the war Sometimes there are great discontinuities and other times there are surprising continuities.

Matthias Sauerbruch: The fact that we’re here in this building, the fact that we are using this particular Baukunst Archive, and also the fact that we are trying to subscribe to this idea of modernity as a kind of architectural movement or architectural way of thinking that is trying to address problems of its time in a way could be seen as a sort of, statement.

In any case, we feel happy in this context. 

Tim Abrahams: We’re standing over a model which is about three meters by three meters or two and a half by two and a half, something like that, of the entire exhibition.

It’s incredibly detailed. There’s even. A model of the model that we’re looking at, which is shows a degree of 

fetishism. 

I was going to say attention to detail. 

Louisa Hutton: you see, there are there’s a set of paired vitrines in the center of each hall. So we have six in hall one, another 10 in hall two running down the center of each hall.

And these literally form. The backbone, let’s say, of the exhibition, and the vitrines contain the archival material. And then our models are floating around the space, grouping themselves loosely to the themes that are in the vitrines, around which the vitrines were built.

Matthias Sauerbruch: This is a very large drawing of a legendary competition in 1957. Hauptstadt Berlin. And it was about the reconstruction of the center of Berlin. The competition is called Hauptstadt Berlin, Capital Berlin, and it was absolutely momentous, if you like, historical meeting of minds, where all the European elites or interesting people were taking part .

Louisa Hutton: Alison and Peter Smithson entered this competition. from Holland entered this competition And

Tim Abrahams: this is a heroic image, isn’t it? Yes, it’s fantastic. 

Louisa Hutton: And when you see the quality of the line drawings, which were of course all done by hand, somebody drawing with passion and energy, some existing buildings and then drawing their new proposal, treating the city as a found object because it lay in ruins at that time. Here you can see the Reichstag the Brandenburg Gate. 

Matthias Sauerbruch: How much, how much of it is as found and how much of it is tabula rasa is basically a subject of the first vitrine, as a matter of fact.

But we took this as an iconic entry into the whole debate. And Combined it with our GSW project, which is here represented by a model and this drawing belongs to that project as well. 

Tim Abrahams: Oh, that’s your drawing for the first images for the GSW. And that’s a key building for you because it’s, I 

Matthias Sauerbruch: mean, you can historically it’s also, this is after the war, which was obviously an enormous incision in the whole of Europe 

GSW is designed in 1990, 91. 89 the war came down and it was a rupture in history. And so in a way, these two architects reactions to their time were the opening to the whole exhibition.

Louisa Hutton: And at the same time, the building onto which our GSW project is an extension itself Is a built example of the ideas that were shown in this drawing by Hans Scharoun and Wils Ebert which is part of a reconstruction of the centre of Berlin that was 95 percent destroyed. 

 

Louisa Hutton: this model of the center of Mestre is showing an existing Cloister and some former stable buildings and the surroundings of a site where we won a competition to design M9 it’s a building to exhibit the history of the 20th century, the Draw Love Build exhibition was shown three years ago, and there are some drawings on the wall, and there’s a larger scale model of the cloister 

Matthias Sauerbruch: it’s, an example of what we’re describing as palimpsest, which is this overlaying of different generations, or different, attitudes. It’s basically the historical European city brought up to date, Because we’re adding a contemporary building, which is sort of inviting everybody in, it’s using the museum as a cultural institute, 

but 

Tim Abrahams: it’s formally also dynamic, it’s taking full advantage awkward site, and it’s filling it and being expressive as well. Addressing the existing condition is very useful. But one of the great things about here is that you’re still giving it a good go.

Matthias Sauerbruch: This is Hugo Herring, the center of Berlin. 

Um, Yes, that’s the, that’s a very 

Tim Abrahams: That the Plan Voisin look contextual.

Matthias Sauerbruch: Look at this one. This is by an architect called Walter Schwagenscheidt, who was part of the Ernst May team. They went out to support the the revolutionary planners in the city of Magnitogorsk, up in Siberia. And this is an essay of his, written in this German script, about what the Russian city should be like, right? It’s unbelievable. And then look at this one. This is Heinzelmann The kind of most prolific architect of the GDR, the East German Socialist state.

And it’s the center of Berlin that this is Friedrichstrasse and basically the Schloss had been blown up by that time and it’s a monumental modernist reconstruction of the Eastern city center. Wow. 

Tim Abrahams: Those are [00:10:00] beautiful, aren’t they?

Matthias Sauerbruch: I mean it’s done by a convinced socialist, and this monumental axis which has nothing left of it. Is originally a 16th century plan which was really filled in the 18th century and then built over in the 19th century. Except for the two domes here on the Gendarmenmarkt, everything else has been erased and replaced with modernist slabs. And flood lowrise buildings and so on.

Louisa Hutton: This vitrine is called situational city as opposed to the first one we were looking at called Tabular Raza.

Matthias Sauerbruch: You turn around, this is the city of Rostock, and these are Socialist suburbs, which are built after the war in this kind of in the GDR.

It’s not sheer formalism. There’s a lot of social thought but it’s all prefabricated. , towers, same conditions for everybody, good housing for everybody, but same, same, right?

And we have a project there which is being built at the moment of a a college, a kind of university These 

Louisa Hutton: are the timber modules for the student housing 

Um, and I think a good balance between what I mentioned as the flotsam and jetsam of our models sprinkled around the rhythm of the rines.

Tim Abrahams: Yeah. 

Matthias Sauerbruch: To complicate things a bit further, there is a, an app actually, which is specially made for this exhibition. And it serves to come back to this issue how do you exhibit architecture, right? And we chose models. to represent all of our projects. Just one model every time. And models are obviously very nice because you can immediately understand, it’s accessible. Particularly for non architects. 

Louisa Hutton: But 

Matthias Sauerbruch: of course a model only goes so far in its content. And so therefore we created for every project, a set of documents which will, to an architect or somebody who’s more interested in the concepts and so on, will explain it.

Louisa Hutton: But not all of the projects were built. For example, this was a competition for Birmingham called Aston Science Park where we didn’t win, but we love our design and we kept this model that was made in London and Lebrie Road and it’s rather dusty and old 

it was done with poly filler and baked in our oven. How many times? 

Matthias Sauerbruch: And here you see something that’s particular again for Berlin and the post war reconstruction here. The city was totally ruinous. And this is the bombed Reichstag. And , not many people know this, that before the renovation, there were Because it had, another architect had done a much more reduced renovation of the building, a guy called Paul Baumgarten, who you see here, sitting in front of the bombed piece.

It was a total ruin and they had an exhibition on German history in this for years. And he made a very basic, very simple very if you like fix, simple space 

so it’s a kind of 

Tim Abrahams: inhabited ruin in many ways. Exactly, 

Matthias Sauerbruch: and it was a very impressive piece of architecture. Talking 

Louisa Hutton: of the history. This set of buildings that were designed as a school in the GDR period in Berlin, so prefab buildings for a school with a generous courtyard it’s been used as a school ever since, and the new owners of the school after the reunification wanted to extend the facilities upwards, so we did the extension purely in timber which is obviously lightweight. The existing structure could take up to two floors in some cases.

On first glance one thinks. Oh, it’s an ugly building. It’s typical GDR with applied. Bricks but we found through working on it that we came to love it and we chose copper because it works with the Reds of the brick cladding.

Tim Abrahams: It’s a beautiful bit of work, I must say. I really loved it. And it’s quite funny because it’s, you experience it as this very expressive warm interior and exterior. But then there’s also, there’s like this hidden rationality behind it where you’re actually creating a uniform roof line. What’s this? 

Louisa Hutton: The last drawing within palimpsest piece of wall is our fire station in Berlin. There’s a site next door to it where we won a competition. And that’s under construction at the moment. And you’ll see the model for that building in the next hall. 

Tim Abrahams: So you’re becoming your own palimpsest?

Louisa Hutton: Yeah, maybe. If 

this 

is one of our favorite new buildings called Benjamin Franklin Mannheim, it’s a small scale model of. Six buildings, four of them forming a courtyard, and there’s an existing building onto which we’ve added a wooden addition. The whole thing is made of a timber, it’s a timber building with interior access to flats.

And the idea is to bring people together to offer housing to people who are normally on the edge of the housing market . The client is two theologians who really have a big heart and they managed to get investors who didn’t insist on a high capital return.

Tim Abrahams: And so that, that’s an existing building. Yes, in fact, 

Louisa Hutton: it’s in a former barracks area of Mannheim. That’s why it’s called Benjamin Franklin, because that’s the name of the whole barrack area. 

Tim Abrahams: This is a huge room. one of the things that is most obvious when you come into this room is the use of color. It points out the relationship between the vitrines and the extra material, but it’s also, I think, something more than that, isn’t it?

Louisa Hutton: Yeah, we always try to use color in an atmospheric way, and I’ve seen this hall many times, obviously, visiting other exhibitions, and it’s a huge 900 square meter hall with white walls, six rows of shed lights Twelve columns, concrete columns set just in front of the walls and a beautiful floor made of end on end grain timber that’s nicely aged since the late fifties, but what we hoped would happen and indeed, I think it does happen is the 16 color patches really pull the room together. 

Tim Abrahams: How do you? Organize color and to what degree is it scientific and to what degree is it just instinctive 

Louisa Hutton: mean, I think it’s scientific in the sense that we do many iterations to try and get exactly right what we think. But in the end, we’re judging with our eyes. 

Matthias Sauerbruch: A kind of science experiment would be as you do a sequence , of variations until you find the right answer to what, to a particular problem. But of course it’s all based on mostly uh, Dialogue between the two of us 

Tim Abrahams: okay, let’s play the game of describing colors. What’s this color that we’ve got on the wall here? 

Louisa Hutton: It’s a muddy, dirty, dark grayish blue, a sort of sea blue because it’s slightly greenish. It’s actually a warm blue, although that sounds like a contradiction, but it’s one of our favorites actually. 

Tim Abrahams: And that one there. 

Matthias Sauerbruch: I would describe it as a sort of gold in a way. As gold as it gets without having actual metal. And right next to it is very yellowy green, almost neon green. 

Louisa Hutton: And right over there in the corner where we have a fantastic Leporello by Bruno Taut. The color of the wall there is a very deep, rich, earthy brown aubergine. I mean, The colors are quite difficult to describe in words.

Here, so this is the vitrine relating to vision in motion, which is the title of a book by Moholy Nagy. So it’s a quotation that we took. There’s a beautiful drawing of Bexhill-on-Sea by Mendelssohn with lots of sketches done in a very soft six B pencil. Curves everywhere and the beautiful interior staircase.

And a drawing by Herring for Alexanderplatz. Showing very dynamic buildings, and if we look askance at the ochre wall over there, you’ll see a drawing by the Luckhardt Brothers for Alexanderplatz which is similarly dynamic 

and then, all the schemes here, the models that you see from our work are related to this theme, for example, the ADAC high rise with a star shaped base of five stories, then a twenty story high rise. In fact, when you stand behind that model and look towards the lookart drawing on the wall, there are surprising affinities.

Tim Abrahams: Yes, there are. It’s really interesting, some of the themes that you’ve picked out. You’re not messing around when you’re talking about the principles of modernism, are you? The idea of motion and moving we pay lip service to but we tend to forget some of the principles to it.

Louisa Hutton: Yes, . 

Tim Abrahams: And movement is such a key one. It’s 

Matthias Sauerbruch: become, it’s become a matter of course. We, not only, perceive buildings, the way we’re using them in movement, and in a way, they’re also somehow conceived as objects to be moved in or moved around.

Tim Abrahams: I don’t know. I agree with you, and I agree that your buildings do, but I think certainly, within British architecture. I don’t think that’s, 

Matthias Sauerbruch: is that right not do you think so? I think it’s, I 

Tim Abrahams: We think that it should be, but it’s not an active design principle. Right. Whereas I, it’s very much something that sets your work apart, I think. 

Louisa Hutton: Many of our buildings, certainly at the beginning of our career and also now actually, are located on sites of former infrastructure where you do have the speed of the trains or the canal or the motorway roundabout, which this building in Konstanz, or here the renovation Siemens building in Munich that’s on the ring road.

And we designed a very dynamic approach to the re-cladding. You have to come and walk, 

Matthias Sauerbruch: walk around the model with us. It changes color as you go around, and each corner has its own, it has its own color. And it’s sitting by a motorway in the middle of Munich. You can actually see this as you drive by.

So it’s very dynamic. It’s very dynamic, and it changes, it responds to movement, if you like. It can only be understood fully if you move around. 

Louisa Hutton: This is a drawing of that idea of the colors changing around the building. So it’s a square that’s rotated. So it’s hanging as a diamond on the wall. And it shows the building from different points of view, because as you walk along the facade that started with reds, they’ll gradually turn to yellows. And if you look at the facade that looks yellow, as you walk along it, it’ll gradually turn to greens, etc.

And the whole thing is a renovation project of an existing building, and this is a new skin. That was added in elements and that the elements enabled us to place small strips of color. It’s powder coated metal every one meter twenty five around the building. 

Tim Abrahams: So let’s see what’s right at the center of this hall.

Matthias Sauerbruch: A theme [00:20:00] for our architecture in a way. It’s what in German is called Materialgerechtigkeit. In English we translate it as Material and Appearance.

There’s obviously in the modern movement, there is this thought of truth to construction and materials so that a concrete building should look like a concrete building, and there are many examples here. You can see the two Mies van der Rohe drawings of the glass skyscraper at Friedrichstraße here in Berlin. It’s trying to make glass like crystal, but this is even, that’s Mies’s housing project here in Berlin. And that actually is starting to acknowledge uh, The idea of coating because he has a plaster coat and it’s expressed at the windows.

You can see very much as a layer that is sitting on the brickwork. You have here the Einstein Turm by Mendelssohn, which is pretending to have this kind of plastic concrete appearance.

In reality, it was actually brickwork, which was plastered over. So This idea of Truth in material is one which is still stuck in people’s heads today, except that of course today because of the conditions of sustainability, heating and insulation and all of that, as a principle, we have layered external walls that are consisting normally of one minimum two layers quite often also of three or four layers.

And in our architecture, we were trying to. Say design these layered facades truthfully, if you like, and show them as an, as a, for example, a dress. That’s why you have this model of the project in Sheffield, which is actually a dress. It was made by a seamstress or she’s really a fashion designer.

And it has the It has all the colors and everything, and it can be worn. It’s These are legs and you can put it over your 

Louisa Hutton: head. But what are the bands of the grey ribbons here are bands of stainless steel. So the building is situated in Sheffield. We wanted the spandrel panels to have to do with the materiality of the city, which is this.

this production of stainless steel, and that’s why it was bombed, and that’s why the center was free for this building, if you like, so it’s taking the history of the location into the expression of the building and the paired vertical ribbons. Which in the silks on this model are back painted glass, which on the west facade of the building, are concealing, actually, virtual chimneys.

Tim Abrahams: Why did you make the model as a dress? 

Louisa Hutton: In fact, we were inspired. Jeremy Till was the curator of the Biennale British Pavilion at the time. And he had the theme of Sheffield, he was head of architecture at Sheffield at the time, and we. Often talk about the cladding is dressing. It goes back to Semper, actually, who wrote about this, and we feel that the word city dress describes what a building does in the city. It presents itself really like a person who might dress up for a special occasion or might wear clothes that more fit into the surroundings, according to the situation in the urban realm.

Tim Abrahams: Did you make this specifically for the pavilion ? 

Louisa Hutton: Yes, we did. We made a pattern for it. Like the patterns that are sold for making clothes that are on very thin tracing paper. So you can even make it yourself. And this is a double building with a larger part and a much smaller part. And it’s a building for the government. And here you see a part facade model of the building.

So it will be used by a government ministry. In the future. In fact, we don’t know which one yet, which is slightly strange because the temporary use for the building, which is the first use of it, will it’ll be used by the president. Herr Steinmeier, because his Schloss, which is just near here, will be renovated.

Tim Abrahams:  Right. 

Louisa Hutton: It’s quite a strange brief to design something that has to be, have a certain, in German, Staatswirtigkeit, or a certain degree of representation of the nation, let’s say, or of the values of what it is to be Germany in this day and age.

At the same time, it shouldn’t look ostentatious or expensive

here we have a large scale model which is showing that, in fact, the materiality of the facade is not timber here. We have a timber building with ceramic cladding in waves and within the waves of the ceramic panels. We have metal railings, which sometimes are railings so that you can open the window and look out or do the cleaning or whatever. And at other times are just making optical Oscillation on the facade 

Tim Abrahams: So the railings are different colors to the ceramic panel. So you’re, oh, Oh, wow. You’ve got a 

Louisa Hutton: If rather grey monochromatic buildings in the neighbourhood, which is typical of Berlin, to have this rhythm of one metre thirty five, which works very well with the car park and very well with a modular office of a double bay to 2.7 metres. And they end up looking very boring and repetitive. We have the same condition. That they needed to have this rhythm on the building for the modules and the offices But we wanted to transcend that rhythm by having larger patches of color on it 

there are 15 ceramic colors and about eight railing colors 

Tim Abrahams: What’s this? 

Louisa Hutton: So this is a significant project. In fact, this was made for 

The Dessau model, this huge model, was built actually for the Biennale curated by Dejan Sujdic, called Next. I remember a beautiful model by Alvaro Siza for his museum in Porto Alegre with the sort of ramps coming out of the building. And we were particularly keen to build a large model, this scale it’s not 1 to 50, it must be 1 to 100, of this very large building in Dessau for the environment, Federal Environmental Agency.

For And we wanted the model to almost look like a kid’s toy, ie. to have a very little degree of detail and made mostly of timber and then with colored glass panels that are on the facade and the obviously sprayed silver metal structure of the roof, giving it a sort of filigree appearance, but really to have the building as a very haptic, sensual thing.

And we the making the model helped us progress on the, distribution of color around the building on the park side, we have a family of greens, which when it comes into the corner of the city of Dessau, it changes to oranges and pinks, 

Tim Abrahams: There’s lots of different types of drawings, different types of representation you’ve managed to fit in. Is that something you had to work out? Or is that just a habit? Reflects the practice of the office.

It seems to be the latter, if you don’t mind me saying. We always like to experiment and find new ways of showing what is important about a particular idea or a particular building. Whether it’s to do with the context of the building or the interior spaces. Or facade treatment. 

Louisa Hutton: Actually, on the painting over there, you can see the, we interpreted the site of the school as a field. You can see the sort of grey coloured field with the long buildings on, set within this almost Tuscan landscape of fields and trees on the edge of Lake Constance.

Tim Abrahams: That’s a very different type of painting that I’ve seen so far. Again, there’s lots of different, different types of representation that you’re using. Is that a watercolour? 

Matthias Sauerbruch:It’s an acrylic. 

Tim Abrahams: It’s an acrylic. Yeah, but 

Matthias Sauerbruch: it was originally on canvas. We stupidly handed it in at the time.

We couldn’t afford the print.

Tim Abrahams: Lesson learned. Is there a, were there drawing, is there a drawing that you couldn’t use, which you wish you’d had?

I’m wondering about your experience in the archive. Was there any particular drawings which you couldn’t Yeah, 

Matthias Sauerbruch: there was, actually, there’s a there’s a really beautiful, pencil drawing of a kind of object building sitting on A promontory in the middle of a lake here in near Berlin.

And it was like a crystal, a just beautifully, Beautifully drawn. Fluent pencil drawing, and we thought we must have that. And we found out it was a competition. Entry by the Lukac brothers for the Deutsche Arbeitsrunde, which is a sort of Nazi organization.

They’re fantastic architects, and I’ve never seen 

Louisa Hutton: such a beautiful drawing. And then that had to come out right at the last minute, so thank goodness we found out.

 This it’s basically a huge conference center in Tokyo.

Your 

Tim Abrahams: drawings have a Keith Haring quality at this stage. Yes, 

Matthias Sauerbruch: yes. Because I mean we were doing this at the very beginning of our office, we were literally the two of us and maybe one assistant and at that time renderings were not so common as they are today and also the tools weren’t really as developed as they are today. So we were trying to avoid rendering, A, because we couldn’t afford them , and B, because we thought and still think actually that’s just really kitsch. Yes. And the trouble is now you have to do them. And so we were looking for a medium that we could cope with, and which would still be expressive.

And so we, we came up with, in retrospect, we then labeled to be haiku drawings, like, how minimal can you be and still explain a spatial connection somehow. 

Tim Abrahams: Just the range of different media you use in your work even the models which can at a distance seem like they’re made in a. In a similar way when you actually explore them you can see the different purpose there for and they’re different qualities and different techniques. The poly filler ones that you’ve made in the early days and then the larger ones, the dress, I really liked the way that you’ve hung different pieces above models at different scales to highlight certain key aspects of the model beneath. 

That’s amazing wow. He’s a 

Louisa Hutton: Bruno Taut 

Tim Abrahams: what? Wow. In fact, 

Louisa Hutton: there’s a series. There’s many more than these. 

Tim Abrahams: What does this say?

Die 

Louisa Hutton: Kugeln, die Kreise, die Räder. 

Tim Abrahams: Which means 

Louisa Hutton: the spheres, the circles, the wheels. 

Matthias Sauerbruch: The language is terribly expressionist and it’s in from the interwar period, when basically [00:30:00] the oldest, these architects didn’t have much work, and they were making poetry, if you like. And it’s this. Slightly bombastic, pompous language, and all of this mixture of spirituality and also, somehow, Geissenbahn, megalomania. 

Louisa Hutton: This is a large building, a tower, as you see, and a lower building at Alexander Platz. 

Tim Abrahams: And the model is seven foot, I would say. 

Louisa Hutton: More. Seven foot six. 

Tim Abrahams: Seven foot six. 

Louisa Hutton: It’s a twin tower at Alexanderplatz following an existing urban plan.

It was basically one of these competitions after reunification for the whole area around Alexanderplatz, of which we saw the drawings by the Luckhardt Brothers and others earlier in the exhibition. In fact, at some point in planning this exhibition, we thought that maybe Berlin and Alexanderplatz could be the subject of Hall 3. But then we realized we were taking on too much. 

Tim Abrahams: But it’s here. 

Louisa Hutton: Here’s the urban model. That’s 

Matthias Sauerbruch: the state of the master plan. As a matter of fact, this is lower now. This is a building by Frank Gehry? And this is an existing, no, this is new, but this is an existing building. 

There was this idea of even more built towers than they are represented here and it was this idea that Berlin would turn into Manhattan.

Or something like that, which of course it will never. And so it’s now it’s become a sort of more like a palimpsest, if you like. Again, it’s not this tabula rasa sort of vision of something that is linear and is going to lead to success. But it’s much more tentative, situative, in a way,

Tim Abrahams: Thank you very much for showing me around the exhibition earlier on. There was, it’s so rich an amazing insight into your practice, intimations of German architectural history, the evolution of Berlin as a city, ideas about the relationship between art and architecture.

You could pick one of those to do one podcast on each. But what I wanted to ask you is about the effect and the impression of creating the exhibition the first time around at Mestre had on the practice of Sauerbruch Hutton

Matthias Sauerbruch: the, making a retrospective, as it were of the last 35 years of practice. Obviously, it introduces a sort of aspect of time. You are aware that you’ve been around and you’ve been working for quite some time, more than you actually think

Obviously you have to explain yourself when you make a show of architecture. And as we always felt, somehow drawn to heroic modern architecture and we both have been working in offices when we were young that work with that material of the heroic modern era. One, one does, what is modern or how do we define ourselves?

When you read retrospectively about modern architecture between the wars mostly, or even after the war, and you read about CIAM or Team 10 or something like that, these organizations, and you always think. Oh, wow, there was this like minded group of architects who were pushing each other. They were driving towards one goal. I’m not sure whether it actually was like that, but it definitely isn’t like that anymore. So, everybody somehow is positioning him or herself in time.

And this attempt to create a space of opinions, to create a context for what we have done and what we are showing when we were invited to show the exhibition again in Berlin, it seemed to us worthwhile to maybe have a second go at this this attempt of contextualization and somehow understanding in a way retrospectively and also communicating.

What we have been doing in the past. And as the Academy has this fantastic archive, really, of artist heroes, if you like, or people who we highly respect; whose work we appreciate it seemed like an idea, why not try and make two exhibitions in a way. And I have to admit that I think it is more successful than expected.

Just because it opens up such wide fields of association, you see this thing and think, oh wow, Did we apply similar resolutions, but what were the problems and how did it come off, and would we do this again today or not, and so on 

Mark Wigley points out that modern architecture in a way can never be contemporary because it’s so slow. If, by the time you’ve built something, five years have gone by and in five years everything may be totally different and you’re somehow lagging behind time. And he describes this as a dance with time; that architects in a way somehow are forced to be in front or behind but the other night we had a discussion about the archive, and one beautiful thought, I think, came out of that discussion, which is that, in a way, that the modern moment, if you like, happens in the mind of the viewer, because you’re starting to make these sort of associations of your own, and you’re trying to categorize and order what you’re seeing. I think it is a kind of very nice view on modern architecture. 

Louisa Hutton: I agree with you. I also think it’s more successful than I had imagined it might be. Obviously that’s a subjective opinion and obviously we were totally immersed in curating together with Dirk van den Huyffel from the TU Delft what we wanted to bring out of the archive and how we might show it.

 One thing, just in terms of the aspect of time, again, it’s quite weird to see oneself. In a way in history, but I guess that happens to all of us as we get older, you realize that your life is intimately bound up with historical events and in this case, the fall of the wall in Berlin and now the climate and the the lack of democracy through the world et cetera, that one’s life is it.

absolutely intimately entwined with the context of what’s going on. And of course it’s difficult normally to get a perspective 

Tim Abrahams: And that comes from this version of the exhibition particularly, do you think? 

Louisa Hutton: I would say yes, for me it does, this addition of the archive material turns it into something very different. And I hope it will have a further, deep effect on the way the work of our office develops. 

Tim Abrahams: Matthias, you gave a very good idea of how the exhibition operated within your understanding of time and I was wondering: how did it influence the work of the office? Did it, or is it just a personal understanding? 

Matthias Sauerbruch: One has to take another fact into account which is that we changed the structure of our office about five years ago. We are now legally speaking a partnership of sixteen whereas before we were three partners and associates.

We have now sixteen partners and. 

Louisa Hutton: Ten associates. Yeah. 

Matthias Sauerbruch: And the reason for doing this is obvious. We’re both strictly speaking, we’re pensioners. Not that we particularly feel like we fulfill that status particularly well, but obviously one has to accept that the likelihood of illness or whatever absence is increasing, and so therefore one is well advised to somehow look for some continuity or how to create continuity.

And in our instance, we chose to offer the engagement to our long term collaborators. Almost everybody who is now a partner has been working with us for 20 years or something like that. And so how do you create an inheritance, that somehow is useful, that somehow means something, that people can turn into a tradition or an ongoing concern.

Yes, 

Louisa Hutton: from which they can develop. 

Matthias Sauerbruch: And it’s an issue of different life experiences, and different also what education and so on. How have you been formed as an architect in your life? It’s also an issue of transfer of responsibility, and somehow the need for our new partners to engage in a new perspective.

But it’s also an opportunity to compare thoughts or compare concerns. And we find it extremely interesting to see our partners giving tours to the exhibition. Because everybody is telling a different story. And we think that’s very useful because it creates a common communicative basis. I think it was extremely useful because it’s not so easy to really talk about architecture. 

Louisa Hutton: As Matthias said, it’s the names of the vitrines through which we are viewing the work, as well as our partners, as well as visitors. And it puts another, we haven’t forgotten draw love and build and it’s what we do all the time but it somehow puts things in a different light and I think that’s really interesting and yeah I think The legacy, if you, I would hope, of this exhibition on our will be that the partners are taking it forward.

We’re still going to be around, I hope, and still work in and for the office. But on the finissage; the last weekend of the exhibition, on 18th and 19th January, on the 19th, the Sunday, only our partner’s going to speak in a symposium about the future of architectural practice. 

We will be in the audience. Interested in what our partners will say. 

So there is another energy building up amongst those partners where we are not in the circle. We didn’t choose them as a group. And they have to build the group themselves, they have to form that, and that’s the agency of the exhibition is it’s forcing them to do this, 

Tim Abrahams: was that a deliberate strategy the way in which the exhibition should be operative in that sense? Or is it just: these are two processes which are happening at the same time and they mutually feed each other as one might expect they should? 

Matthias Sauerbruch: No, it’s more or less a deliberate intent.

But there are certain steps you have to undertake when you make this such transformation. We now have invited everybody to become part of the business . And at the end of the seven year process everything that belongs to the office belongs to everybody in equal measure. But how does that apply to the work? And we felt that the work, we should make somehow a threshold, say, up to here. And [00:40:00] that also went very well with transferring most of the legacy to the academy to be part of their archives. It’s a relatively deliberate act. 

Louisa Hutton: In fact, all the ongoing projects, we keep the actual material in the office because we need it for ourselves and the clients. But the models belonging to past projects; those will go to the archive. Some of the drawings we keep here because we love them. And so there’s a bit of a soft edge to it, but we are trying to define a moment in time. That’s true. And it coincides beautifully with the exhibition. 

Tim Abrahams: One of the things that I was most taken with was the idea of a living history. Because we were talking earlier, I was being critical of a position in which the idea of history informing architecture is purely architectural history, purely technical; hermetically sealed almost. So one of the things that I was most taken with was the way in which this history was alive. And I wanted to ask you about the city in which you are working. What do you think of the period through which you have worked? 

Louisa Hutton: I think Matthias should start, because Matthias studied in Berlin and then came to the AA where we met and started our practice. Now we’re back in Berlin, but I think it’s, Matthias’s City, first of all, my city by adoption. 

Matthias Sauerbruch: I don’t think there’s anybody sitting in, in that respect. Because I was born in southwest Germany and I came here aged 20, two or something like that. And just like London you don’t have to come from a family that’s been living here for two or three generations in order to be a Berliner. Berlin is very open, very fast, you can come in and out, and somehow that’s one of its strengths and weaknesses, I’d say, because what’s lacking is the social sediment of of tradition of wealth, of what would be nobility in England or the grand family in Paris, or so you don’t get that in Berlin.

It’s all like self made people pushing for the top sort of thing. And that has its charms. And of course, Berlin is relatively young. It was really turning into a city only in the 18th century. So it’s comparable to American cities in a way. And that sort of rough and ready is a potential but also a problem because there’s a desire, the Schloss, Stichwort, that kind of there is a great desire to somehow create a sort of important inheritance or important kind of history, if you like.

correct history. There are a few chapters actually which need a bit of treatment.

And so all of that I think makes Berlin great. And one has to say that the 89, the moment of the reunification really was incredible. It really was probably the most moving experience of my life. And this wonder and excitement and energy lasted a good decade, I would have thought.

Particularly as the city was undergoing such change. You were talking about it earlier. It was so visible as well. Now it’s a bit more dogged down, by its own problems, many of them self made. And as an architectural scene it doesn’t, I’d say, it doesn’t have the sophistication as London, for example, does.

There are architecture schools here as well, obviously, but it’s maybe a bit of a wholesale argument, but nevertheless, I, my feeling is that the architectural culture or building culture is not quite as developed as in London. But at the same time, the city is not so cruelly commercial, it’s like London is so commercial, everything’s so driven by money.

there is at least a memory of public responsibility and common ownership. That’s it. I don’t know if we had a free choice. I’m not sure whether we would have stayed in Berlin, but then you, obviously you grow with your projects. The GSW project, our first big one, took nine years to realize. In those nine years, We made many friends, we changed apartments twice, we moved with the office, we did many competitions, we won one or two competitions, we had building size and, so you build up this home, if you like, which can also be a prison, because you can’t really move, because, the commitments of the office and all of that architecturally speaking, there were these great opportunities here, not all of which have been taken in the best possible way, I think. Reconstructing a government area, for example, redefining the center of the city, the cultural institutions, museums, and so on and so great opportunities, that maybe we should be I’ve tried to take part, not all of them were successful, but so it was a place where things were happening, basically and there still is some of that, but it’s because, it’s as I say, it’s been more talked down by its own problems.

For example, the housing problem is a huge issue. One automatically thinks back of 1918 or 1915, 16, even… and the developments by the Tauts and so on. Why don’t we have something similar today? Where’s the Manifestos, without compromise, the future is going to be this and it’s going to be that and poof.

Today, it’s post on Instagram and it’s forgotten in two days. How do you create something that has a lasting meaning and that also guides you in your own decisions in a complex world? 

Tim Abrahams: That’s one of my comments is that, that just being back in Berlin after a long time away is that it’s more like, and you use the phrase is more like a normal, normal city.

Louisa Hutton: For us the whole of the early 90s was this explosion of euphoria and luckily, our GSW competition, the win came at that time. And therefore we could build this high rise with the double skin actually on both sides of the building etc. Because there was such optimism in the future. And at this time, the artists were all coming from Cologne and from other parts of Europe to live in the cheap spaces in Berlin and in ateliers and the collectors from America came. Berlin never had money, as Matthias said. But this has all sunk a bit now. And as you say, you notice that many spaces have been filled. There’s not enough housing. That’s a whole other question. But I think the art scene is still very alive in Berlin, but it’s not quite as exciting as it was in the 90s and the early 2000s.

I think it will pick up again. Actually, I’m quite optimistic for Berlin, but in terms of its city politics they privatized a lot of housing and now there’s just not enough money and the processes are too slow, et cetera, et cetera. There are huge complexities. which shouldn’t be there, actually

it’s almost impossible to do affordable housing here in Berlin and in Germany at the moment, but particularly here. Despite the fact that the scene has changed, I do think it’s still a really interesting city in which to be based and from which to operate, it has become possibly slightly normalized or less like Soho in New York in the sixties or whatever. 

Tim Abrahams: It was utterly unique. Yeah, it was exceptional. It’s not like you, it’s just any city is lucky to have one of those moments in its entire history. And you definitely felt you were, I’m not gonna start quoting Hegel, but it was like the spirit of world history was upon you. And, but but life goes on. What has been the evolution of clients? or is competition winning an engine to the practice? 

Louisa Hutton: The competition has enabled us to grow our own practice and to win competitions and therefore to develop as architects. On the other hand Many competition practices juries, suffer from the lowest common denominator phenomenon of not necessarily, in our view, the best scheme winning, but somehow you have to convince a jury of 28 people 27, it has to be an odd number, sitting around a table and everything gets discussed to death and often the technical solutions are, too highly judged and the artistic or the imaginative solutions aren’t given the due that they deserve. 

Matthias Sauerbruch: You have lots of people who have an interest. Who have been invited to voice their opinion. Like politicians. You get a lot of specialists. Climate engineers. Traffic engineers. Cost engineers. Or I don’t know. can step up and say but this is by far the most expensive scheme and blah, blah, blah, and it’s totally stifling. You get into a room and there are even more than 27 or whatever, there are up to 40 people.

Louisa Hutton: Of course the Germans want to do it correctly, but often that correctness is more to do with technology than to do with a brilliant solution. But I have to say we have had luck in winning some great competitions, particularly the ones where we broke the rules. So we have benefited from the competition system at the same time as now being slightly critical of it.

Matthias Sauerbruch: The competition system is very much ambiguous in my head because also we’ve done so many competitions and it’s such a waste of money.

It’s unbelievable. It’s really a lot of energy that goes into it. And in the exhibition, there are a few competition entries that we consider a contribution, which we like to be discussed in public, but the majority of the stuff disappears. 

Tim Abrahams: And just to return to my original point about clients and does competitions rule everything, 

Matthias Sauerbruch: or do you have, yes, it does basically but having said that on an institutional level, there are a few people who are very engaged and they’re really trying to push the boundaries. But the processes are very tiresome. Stodgy. You really have to fight against it.

It costs energy just to create the right start. But having said that the project that we saw earlier it’s a fantastic client. There’s a number of institutions, but somehow they form a really productive constructive team.

It’s very wonderful. When you say the project we 

Tim Abrahams: saw before, you mean the the temporary presidential offices. 

Matthias Sauerbruch: Offices, yeah, exactly. And now the same goes for that college in Oslok. Really positive [00:50:00] team. They have their rules and they obviously have to move within limitations 

but They’re doing that very well and it’s good fun to work with them. 

Louisa Hutton: So we have phases in our career where we do have some great private clients. And then some of them not cause they’re too greedy in our view.

And then a whole series of institutional clients or public clients who we value in the end, cause they do put the common good at a high level. So we’ve been through both. 

Matthias Sauerbruch: to get people into dialogue, when it works, it’s fantastic. That’s our preferred mode of operation. But if you’ve been through a competition, then it’s already not so easy anymore because the competition is the sole legal basis of anything further and you really need to have somebody who’s willing to be flexible in order to develop it 

Louisa Hutton: in terms of the competition the respect given to the institution of this competition system is that the first building we completed in Berlin was the photonic center because it was a very fast building. The competition was in 95 and it was completely built by 98.

A lot of precast concrete elements and at the competition we designed two buildings. On the site of what should have been one building. And then, after we had won the competition, the client said to us, Oh, please build a bridge and we told them, no, it doesn’t work. That space between is a very deliberately designed urban space. It doesn’t work with a bridge. And they went to the Senate, who was on the jury crying, to mum and dad. And the Senate said, no, you have to respect the architects and the documentation of the competition win.

And so we offered a passage underground and that’s what was built. 

Tim Abrahams: So that 

Louisa Hutton: was good. 

Tim Abrahams: Competition, the laborious process. Yes. Occasionally. Yes. It pays off. That’s, that’s really interesting. What are your other hopes for the exhibition?

Louisa Hutton: I would hope the more specific legacy. of our exhibition, notwithstanding everything that we’ve said about the office would be that everyone can see whether they’re architects or not, that somehow life and artistic projects are always in dialogue with the past. You, you can’t escape it.

Matthias Sauerbruch: The other thing is that it’s basically, it’s a means of communication. It’s pulling out the work out of the cupboards and the basements and just putting it up on show to people and get reactions and conversations going. So people will see it and it will form a kind of benchmark for conversation, I think. 

Tim Abrahams: Thank you very much, Matthias. Thank you very much to you, Louisa.

Louisa Hutton: Thank you. 

Matthias Sauerbruch: Thank you. Yeah. Yeah. Thank you, Tim. It was great to see you again and in Berlin and have the opportunity to show you our exhibition. 

Tim Abrahams: It’s important to say that. I asked Matthias and Louisa about the significance of the exhibition for their practice. And they gave me a really good and interesting answer. In and of itself. It’s a great exhibition for anyone just interested in architecture; why Berlin looks like it does. It’s open at the Academie Der Kunst until January 19th. If you are in Berlin. If you’re near Berlin, if you’re thinking of going to Berlin, go and see it. There’s a great dialogue going on between the past and the present in it. 

But quite simply, it’s just full of beautiful things. It’s a celebration of the craft of designing buildings, of communicating ways of making, of working things out and sharing ideas. 

If at times you feel there’s too much to get your head round. Well, there’s a lot to get your head round in life, generally. If I lived in Berlin, I would be back there tomorrow. 

I don’t know enough about the German architecture scene to speak with any authority about this, but I think Louisa and Matthias as they move to a new relationship with their practice of being appreciated there as. The inheritors and communicators of values that Germany and Europe as a whole need to cling desperately to an architecture of improvement and architecture that celebrates the values of modernity.

Old school stuff that needs to be communicated in an unequivocal way. 

Sometimes movement has an intrinsic value in creativity, color, joy. Historical research as an act of social empathy, rather than just an assimilation of aesthetic or technical data. Sorry, perhaps that’s too strong a point. Because it’s not really what the exhibition is about. It’s about beauty really, and I strongly commend it to you. I look forward to what they’re going to do next, particularly the presidential offices and their housing scheme in Manheim is fantastic as well. Anyway tThank you, Louisa. Thank you, Matthias. And thank you all for listening.

 

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