TAUTs HOME (TAUTES HEIM)
Basic information
Project Title
Full project title
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Project Description
The privately run museum-like vacation home Taut´s Home is part of a UNESCO World heritage site in the German capital. It has been meticulously restored and is completely furnished in 1920s style from the Bauhaus era. The house makes architectural history tangible and proofs the quality of timeless design. The innovative project communicates a significant phase of European town planning and was frequently awarded and covered. Besides that, it triggered a number of follow-up projects.
Project Region
EU Programme or fund
Description of the project
Summary
The surrounding Hufeisensiedlung is one of six housing estates in the German capital that were jointly declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2008. They were built between 1913 and 1934 to offer solutions for the big housing shortage of the early 20th century. The goal of the city planers was to establish healthy living conditions for everyone and to allow ordinary workers to live in a built environment that followed the slogan „light, air and sun“. Four out of the six “Berlin Modernist Housing Estates” were designed by Bruno Taut, a visionary architect, to whose ideals the project „Taut´s Home“ („Tautes Heim“ in German) refers to. The project is a small museum-like house with garden that allows to really experience the quality of the architecture in full. It has the the character of a time-travel experience, innovates conventional exhibition concepts and is laid out to host 2–4 persons. It offers self-catering facilities and all rooms are completely restored and furnished in the style of the 1920s. These interiors include numerous originals or handcrafted designs inspired by historic photographs. The project was realized without any subsidies or external funding but also serves as a model for heritage-aware restoration and energetic improvements. It is not just referred to by professional bodies (see attached docomomo report) or universities, but also by government officials and the cities touristic agencies. Taut´s Home received several conservation awards and attracts great interest from guests and neighbors. The project was frequently covered in the media and also featured on television, expert and travel media. Getting the owners even more deeply involved with heritage communication, the project also served as a starting point for a number of other projects, including architectural guide books, a huge educational website, the promotion of a civil heritage network plus the co-organization of a multi-regional architectural event scheme (see results chapter)
Key objectives for sustainability
By chance the applicants – a private architect/designer couple from the neighborhood – learned about the sale of a semi-detached row house with garden that was very run down, but still had an outstanding amount of original substance. Finally in spring 2010 we decided to buy the property. Exactly two years of meticulous research, restoration and energetic improvement work followed. During this time, a number of damaged parts were fixed without loosing the original substance. This means that no „gray energy“ was erased by tearing down old structures or wasting materials. Most of the improvements were especially demanding since the whole ensemble of almost 2,000 dwellings is a listed monument. This means that most conventional methods of energetic upgrading are legally prohibited, since they interfere with the demand to maintain the historic view and built structures. But still there are a number of minor improvements that can be done. To give an example: Taut´s Home was actually the first row house, where a specifically developed heritage-aware thin insulation on top of the concrete pent roof was installed. Thanks to its clever construction, this layer remains completely invisible from the outside. This upgrading provided the basis for a good practice model that was frequently adopted within the neighborhood. The same awareness concerning the proper conservation of things and products, can be found inside: large parts of the equipment and furniture dates back to the 1920s and 30s. But despite of their age, all of these products are still fully usable. This proves that following long-lasting design concepts and production standards allows far longer product cycles than those we experience when looking at todays consumer and lifestyle products. Besides that, the garden layout integrates a number of fruit trees and advocates the idea of self-catering, which was an inherent part of the „garden city movement“, which is starting to become more popular again.
Key objectives for aesthetics and quality
The ensemble of a semi-detached small row house and 240 sqm large garden was conceptualized as a tribute to the architect Bruno Taut and his pioneering ideas of interior design. It also illustrates how architecture should be linked with gardens or public greens, to which Taut referred as „exterior living spaces“. Taut´s concepts even inspired contemporaries to create a new idiom: to „tauten“ your home means to reduce the amount of redundant decorative objects, to focus on timeless functional furniture and make use of strong colors. The house which was finished in 1929/30 is only 65 square meters in size, but proves that you do not need that large dwellings if the floor layout is effective. Inside all walls, ceilings, floors and wooden parts have been completely restored in Taut's idiosyncratic color scheme. Besides the three colored historical tiled stoves, a modern and effective heating systems was installed that visually integrates in the 1930s design. All rooms were furnished on the basis of our meticulous research. Most of the smaller furniture and fittings were bought on flea markets or at antique traders. Many of them had to be worked up technically. A few of the larger pieces, like the kitchen furniture, the large folding bed in the blue room and the pull-out sofa bed in the smaller yellow room are in-house designs. They are based on historic models or photos from original publications like i.e. the tenant magazines issued from 1930–1939. If needed, modern, energy effective amenities – such as a dishwasher or a refrigerator – have been discreetly integrated behind the kitchens furniture fronts. From an historians perspective the interior design shows the typical mixture of emerging modernsim. It combines rather timeless furniture and a few early classics from the Bauhaus era. The associated garden has been laid out according to plans of the garden architect Leberecht Migge. It includes various fruit trees, flowering beds and a hedge of wild roses.
Key objectives for inclusion
The private owners of Taut´s Home are very much engaged in the preservation and the communication of the six UNESCO-listed estates. Around 2005 they started offering guided group tours for tourists, students, experts, neighbors or official care-takers in and around the Hufeisensiedlung. During tours participants always want to know what it's like to live behind these strikingly colored facades, how the rooms are arranged, what owners are allowed to change and what the standards were like back then in the 1920s. All these topics might be displayed and explained with the help of (rare) interior photographs or in a typical – do not touch – museum environment. But to really provide a deeper understanding of the value and character of design and architecture, you must be able to use and experience things on your own. This was the starting point for Taut´s Home. Unlike an ordinary museum the house isn’t designed just to be looked at, but lived in. Staying for a few nights is probably the closest architecture enthusiasts can get to the spirit of emergent Modernism at the late 1920s. The rental fee is calculated to be cost effective and (hopefully) serves to refinance the personal expenses for restoration. In order to also offer less expensive rates, different seasons and rates apply. For all those who can not afford the rent, there are additional occasions for a mere visit without entrance fees, i.e. during the European Monument Days. As it comes to barrier-free access the status of beeing a listed monument sets the limit. Since the original access to the house includes two steps and a steep stairwell the 2-storey house is unfortunately not accessible for wheelchairs. In order to provide an alternative to a physical visit and to make virtual offers also for visually impaired or deaf persons, there are are various presentations available online, including special accounts at Facebook, Instagram as well as live illustrated lectures which are partly recorded at Youtube.
Results in relation to category
Despite the implementation without any third-party or subsidy funding, Taut´s Home is regarded as the most active and lively ambassador of Berlin's World Heritage today – a kind of institution to which the Berlin monument, culture and tourism authorities refer on a regular basis. Besides that, there are numerous requests from neighbours or people who live in houses and apartments from the same period and seek for information. House and garden have inspired a lot of neighbors to regain parts of the historical color schemes or to recultivate the original garden layout with fruit trees and flower beds, which also provides good circumstanzas for bees and insects. – an intended effect that helps to spread the value of monument preservation and promotes versatile garden usage.
The project also attracts great interest from the media and the professional public. It has often been featured on television and in the daily and trade press. The house has been awarded the Berlin Monument Prize plus the very rarely granted Europa Nostra Award in 2013. Apart from that the operation has led to many international contacts and own publication projects. For example the house immediately became a member of the global network of Iconic Houses.
One year after Taut´s Home was finished, the landlords were asked to take part in a brainstorming how to promote the value of 1920s architecture. As an effect of that, the triennale-der-moderne.de was established, an umbrella event where Berlin and the two Bauhaus cities of Weimar and Dessau join forces and offer a joint visit and event program every three years. In 2015 the landlords decided to publish the architectural guide book „Bruno Tauts Hufeisensiedlung“.
From 2018-2020 – as part of the „European Cultural Heritage Year“ – another project was funded and realized: world-heritage-estates-berlin.com is a mobile-friendly educational website with lots of facts, interactive tours and additional information about the six estates.
How Citizens benefit
To understand the background of the project, one must know that the Hufeisensiedlung is the only one of the six "Berlin Modernist Housing Estates", in which – after privatization of the former municipal housing company GEHAG in 1998 – terraced housing stocks were transformed into individual properties. This means that the ensemble monument now belongs to more than 600 individual owners who are jointly responsible for maintaining a world heritage. This created a difficult situation and led to a number of civil society initiated activities: A formal framework for some other initial projects was the founding of a non-profit association in 2007 – the "Friends and Supporters of the Horseshoe Estate in Berlin-Britz". This association acts as the official operator of an café that gives access to various information panels that were also compiled by the landlords of Taut´s Home. This site is located in a former shop keepers apartment inside the central building structure. It is run by volunteers and soon established itself as a meeting place for old and new neighbors and serves as the best starting point for World Heritage tourists from various origin.
Besides those local activities which also includes working with pupils and students, the landlords took an active role and helped to establish the KulturerbeNetz.Berlin, a city-wide network of civil initiatives that care about monument protection in Berlin. The aim of the network, founded 2017, is to empower civil initiatives and to create more awareness and lobbying power for monument issues. The KulturerbeNetz is currently preparing the publication of a "Red List" of endangered buildings in Berlin and reaches out for similar networks in Germany.
Innovative character
Taut´s Home closes a gap in the Germanys museum and heritage landscape. The „pay for use“- principle establishes a new kind of design museum that takes into account what tradiditional exhibitions concepts always ignore: Namely, that architecture and design are always developed with concrete use in mind: I can not fully understand the value of a design object if I am not enabled to use it in a proper real life scenario.
From an economic point of view, the whole project might also serve as a business model in comparable situations, where renting or usage fees might help to recover the cost for restoration and heritage-aware conversion projects.
As far as communication is concerned, the landlords run social media presences on Instagram and Facebook. They also built up international networking and media connections in order to trigger a more international coverage and attract a wider target audience.
From a local perspective the house also serves as an example for proper restoration and energetic upgrading of listed properties. This especially true, since Taut´s Home was created and launched soon after the two landlords, helped to establish hufeisensiedlung.info – a huge database that went online 2010/11. This website includes almost 2,000 micro-sites for all 679 townhouses plus the 1,285 flats of the listed ensemble. These micro-sites offer between 50 to 140 individually compiled detailed plans per dwelling unit and a number of model solutions for energetic upgrading of individual components. Most of these model solutions have been applied at Taut´s Home for the very first time, so that the house and garden itself also serve as a model from time to time.
