Fellows

Project at ZK/U - Walker and Walker

Walker and Walker ( Ireland )

We wish to spend time at ZK/U to research and develop a body of work, in particular a script in relation to ideas instigated by The Crystal Chain. The Crystal Chain also known as the "Utopian Correspondence" was a chain letter that took place between 1919 and 1920 in Germany. It was a correspondence between architects that formed the basis for expressionist architecture in Germany. Unfettered by the demands of practicability, the members described their visions of an ideal society and of a beneficent architecture in a series of dazzling, fantastical letters and drawings. After a year of intense theoretical speculation, several of the members, including Bruno and Max Taut, Walter Gropius, Hans and Wassili Luckhardt, emerged as leading practitioners of the new architecture in Germany and became involved in the Bauhaus.

We are initially focusing on an early treatment of an unrealised film by Bruno Taut, which we are developing into an extended installation, involving a script and set designs. We are researching several locations in Berlin, including the Taut Horseshoe Estate in Britz and Erich Mendelsohn’s Einstein’s tower in Potsdam which was one of the only building built in the expressionist school. Another unrealised project was Wassili Luckhardt’s cult building, which is crystalline in form. We are interested in developing this cult building which would then function as a site to house a number of new works and events which address both the concerns of the Crystal chain group and their far reaching legacies into later movements, from the Bauhaus period, to the counterculture of the 60’s.