The architects who call themselves B+ don’t make architecture the easy way. Even to meet them is an effort. You have to find your way to the sea of “plattenbau” — modular apartment blocks built in the 1970s — in Lichtenberg, a distant suburb of Berlin in what was once East Germany. Then you look for a former factory now mainly used as an Asian wholesale market, locate the one remaining silo, and finally climb 199 steps (there is no elevator) to the aerie the firm has carved out of that former storage site.
There you will find the office in a two-story space perched high above the city, offering spectacular views for your exertions. You can also admire the B+ working method in the space itself: find a building, strip it down to as bare as you can get the bones, make openings where necessary, leaving the act of cutting those holes clearly visible, and add only the most minimal additions that make it possible to live, assuming you are equally minimal in your tastes, in the result.
The firm was founded by Arno Brandluber, who ten years ago transformed his former office, which produced highly crafted, but more conventionally modernist structures, into B+ to pursue a more radical approach to architecture that concentrates on the reuse of especially buildings from the post-War period. With a penchant for Brutalist architecture, he is engaged in such projects as renovating the so called “Mouse House,” a bunker-like former laboratory I wrote about previously. He is also an activist: through his office he is trying to launch a so-called European Citizens’ Initiative, which is an EU mechanism to enact laws from the bottom up, to mandate the reuse of structures before any new building is considered.
Perhaps the best-known of his built efforts is the conversion of a landmark former church in what was West Berlin, the St Agnes Church, designed in 1967 by Werner Düttmann, into a gallery for Johann Köning, one of the most prestigious art dealers in Germany. His big move, after the stripping and emptying out of the space, was to add a floor, supported on separate columns so that it does not touch the fabric of the original building to create a lofty project area in the upper reaches of the church. When I visited, it hosted a suitably minimalist installation that consisted of a few objects strewn across the concrete floor and not much else.
The most radical and strangely intimate structure Brandluber has created, though, is the so-called Antivilla, a 5,500 square foot house in nearby Potsdam that he and his family use, and that he also lets friends and family stay in when he is not there. On a recent spring day one of his associates, Olaf Grawert, drove me out to the small suburb next to a lake, again in the former East Germany, where the project is located.
When Brandluber found the building, which had been part of small, state-owned lingerie factory, in 2010 it was not much more than a concrete box. As his usual method, he stripped it down, adding a new layer of spray-on concrete to the exterior to obtain the insulation local regulations require. An over-scaled downspout, angled out from one of the corners, commemorates the removal of the hipped roof and channels water far away from the exposed building sides.
He then cut those holes in what remained: big openings towards the lake and the side of the building, and a skylight through the roof. Several of these cuts appear more as if they are the results of an explosion than as windows. Others are more conventional and rectilinear in appearance, but are of different sizes and, other than one row on the second floor, are placed in a way that does not indicate any discernable pattern. Even that last sequence misses one opening because the interns at a construction school Brandluber had working on the project did not get around to it. The architect commemorated that fact by painting a white rectangle on the interior wall where the window should have been.
The interior is just as raw as the exterior. You enter the central, almost completely open space on the second floor by rising up a narrow concrete staircase to find yourself in the middle of a gray concrete loft. There are almost no built-in furnishings, and only a concrete box containing the main service elements interrupts the space’s flow. A net hung from a point in the ceiling prevents anybody from falling into the stairwell, which has no railings or cover. Similar devices stop you from tumbling through the windows when they are open. When I was visiting, Brandluber’s small daughter had just sketched out an amoeba-shaped area that she wants as her own space now that she is old enough in her own estimation to need some privacy. The architect plans to translate her floor pattern into fabric curtains.
Brandluber delights in the rawness of the spaces he creates, even keeping some of the moisture damage he found as a pattern on the interior wall and filling the space with big, bulbous furnishings or, by contrast, delicate pieces that have the appearance of having been found at a flea market, albeit one well-stocked with mid-century pieces. In the bathroom, there is no tile, only board-formed concrete with its joints visible, and fixtures produced in Germany in the 1970s in voluptuous shapes the architect likes so much that he has stockpiled them so he can either use them or give them out to friends.
This is architecture is the tradition of the most radical forms of modernism. It continues the belief, inherent in the work of Le Corbusier and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, that we should reduce our lives in such a manner as to be lean and clean enough for the modern age. It delights in the beauty of humanmade materials and exposed building elements. It eschews privacy and separate spaces in favor of communal life and fluidity.
To that tradition, Brandluber and his team then add the idea that such architecture should not be made, but found, excavated, and elaborated out of what already exists. In so doing, B+ brings back to life the heroic and perhaps even sublime aspects of modernism, while also making spaces appropriate for those who see themselves as only temporary occupants alighting in the continual flow of people, goods, and ideas that is at the essence of modernity. The most solid-looking and heroic remnants of that modernist dream remaining serve as anchors for such lives and its architecture. B+’s solutions say that even such perches of and in almost nothing can have a sensuality and sense of place to them, if only you work hard enough to find the qualities that are all around you, reveal them, and highlight them through the design process.
This is what I call imaginative reuse (my book on the topic, featuring the Antivilla, will be published by Beacon Press this fall), and the work of B+ is among the most striking, if also most radical in a Teutonic way, of all such work. Would I live in the Antivilla? Absolutely, but I understand that this is architecture on the fringe of what most would considerable livable. It is thus also architecture that, in the tradition of the programs and manifestos of the 20th century, makes a — beautiful and articulate — statement.
The views and conclusions from this author are not necessarily those of ARCHITECT magazine.
Read more: The latest from columnist Aaron Betsky includes reviews of: William Morris's Red House | Dhaka | Marlon Blackwell's new mixed-use development | Eric Höweler’s social media posts,| Peter Braithwaite's architecture in Nova Scotia,| Powerhouse Arts, | the Mercer Museum, | and MoMA's Ed Ruscha exhibition.
Keep the conversation going—sign up to our newsletter for exclusive content and updates. Sign up for free.
