Hans Scharoun, the last genius German architect of the 20th century, connected most of his life with Berlin: chief architect, president of the Academy of Arts, honorary doctor and honorary citizen, laureate and cavalier, creator of the Philharmonic, the State Library, schools, villas and towers. His diploma was - Russia. Informal, but therefore no less effective. In the city of Chernyakhovsk (until 1946 - Insterburg) of the Kaliningrad region, the first building of his bureau has survived - the "Pestry Ryad" residential area, a monument of expressionism architecture. Built in the early 1920s, preserved even better than its counterparts in Germany, however, it has never been restored and risks being lost forever after returning from oblivion. Meanwhile, the very process of its restoration can make the city of Chernyakhovsk, which is going through hard times, a source of regional and even all-Russian development.
Archi.ru asked the architect-historian Dmitry Sukhin, the head of the Kamsvikus District Society and an authorized representative of InsterGOD, about the current state of affairs with Sharun's legacy in Chernyakhovsk, the restoration of houses and obstacles to revival projects.
Archi.ru:
- What is the history of the appearance of the "Motley row"? How did Hans Scharoun end up in provincial East Prussia?
Dmitry Sukhin:
- In order to understand the origin of the "Village on Kamsvik Alley", aka "Kamsvikus Village", nicknamed for the coloring "Colorful row", you will have to go a little deeper into the past: Hans Scharun worked in Insterburg since April 1917, served as a district architect at his the same pre-war assistant professor. Captain Paul Kruchen himself devoted more time to his prisoners of war construction battalions, since 1915 they rebuilt all of East Prussia with them.
Under his, and therefore Sharun, the leadership worked "construction consultation", a design bureau of artistic and constructive supervision, 5-10 people. At least three of them were prisoners, one French, the others Russian? They were the majority in the camps. They erected about 40 thousand different kinds of houses, sheds, barns, stables, bridges …
Kruchen taught crafts so that they would build not just anything, but what was appropriate here, and not anyhow, but in the most modern way at that time. At the same time, the architects, who arrived in 1915 to restore the destroyed province, learned “Prussianism”, which they had never known before: they didn’t go to “Prussian Siberia” from the “cultural capitals” on the Izar and Rhine, but then the Motherland called to become a hero … The result will then be called “The style of the East Prussian Renaissance” or “restoration”: restrained expressionism or very modernized traditionalism, high roof slopes, rhythmic meager decor … Was the restraint and expression in no small part caused by who, how and when executed the projects? Probably it was. And how similar the circumstances are!
After all, we have to restore, and we have a handful of learned hands, and we need to find "(p) Russianness" first. By November 1918, Sharun had a lot of buildings, supervision, estimates, organized work - but his native university did not accept him with all this: they did not correspond to the curriculum. So, back to the second year? - and he returns to the place where he himself could have something, meant and knew: from April 1, 1919, the office of the district architect Kruchen became the architectural office of Sharun.
Things got going: a year later, Sharun was getting married. Bruno Taut sent him the manifesto "Towards the Building of Color" (September 1919) for his signature, and received it from Insterburg with two signatures at once: Sharun and Rosencrantz, burgomaster. And next to it are such bison as Walter Gropius, Bruno Mehring, Hans Pölzig, Paul Schmitthenner, Fritz Schumacher, Karl Osthaus! But they were not in the capitals, who carried out that manifesto or the "Glass Chain", but these, in the province that had been cut off from Germany. Need forced, it was necessary to occupy the demobilized, to accept refugees from the east: that is why the city, represented by the same Rosenkrantz, back in 1917 founded the Construction Society of Small Apartments and built many of them, and laid the settlements. So when Taut, the pioneer of the "color building", continued his "color schemes" in Magdeburg in 1924, Sharun could already boast of completed houses: general lists of "chromaticity" - the second. The first, Berlin's "Falcon Mountain" Taut, is a UNESCO World Heritage Site. And the second - alas.
Who was the customer and who were the first tenants?
- There were several customers, the housing estate was built in 4 stages. The first was done by the semi-state "House-Building Association of Employees": in April 1920, it announced that in May it received subsidies from the treasury, the region and the municipality, in November - the first building ticket, then another and third, behind the house a house. In May 1921, painting and tin works were contracted on the western side of the then unnamed street. They built the houses on the east side the following year.
In 1923, the railway administration was rebuilt along the Kamsvik Alley. In 1924, the second, the urban society of small apartments, stood in line with this house. Immediately after, the territory was included in the city line.
With such customers, can the "Motley Row" be considered social housing?
- Count, but not name: the term "social housing" was invented only in 1940, by the Nazis. Houses of 1921-24 cannot be such by definition. And the word is not bad … This, by the way, is not the only term that has undergone such a transformation: "to each his own" entered the German language, after the Bible, under Frederick the Great, and meant providing "each" with "his" share of public goods, charity of insufficient citizens … How do we know him, there is no need to explain.
But let us return to the "Motley Ryad": there was no settlement by socially weak groups - everyone was weak at that time! And the manuals were just being invented. This housing was "social" in a different sense, here the "society" was created: the former German residents argued in a conversation that there was some kind of community different from other Insterburgers. Own shops and your own club - and architecture, of course!
Building codes of those years interpreted such houses as "minimal", with rules and fees different from others - large ones. Apartments in semi-detached houses are all the same, in the surviving “city” house - smaller, in the lost “railway” one there were more: 62.5 m2 of total area, three rooms (including a “living kitchen”), a storage room, an entrance hall, a bathroom and a toilet. There is no corridor, the corridors were fought back then.
Who settled in the "Pestroy Ryad"?
- Little people: shopkeepers and postal workers, telephone operators and telegraph operators; railway drivers, cashiers, inspectors and switchmen (these are mainly in the "railway house"); carpenters and masons, coachmen and chauffeurs, tailors and shoemakers, locksmiths and mechanics, electricians and fitters, as well as several soldiers and non-commissioned officers. There are more residents than apartments, so there were communal apartments.
What are the architectural features of the project, what is its uniqueness?
- Sharun created a genuine ensemble, masterfully turning inconveniences into benefits: suburban location, narrow view, small budget … "Economic" construction in the best sense of the word: low consumption, great effect! In the works of peacetime, he does not yet have such a thing, a leap over himself is visible. The similarity can be traced with unrealized competitive works - the same color; with watercolors - there is color and stars that are scattered everywhere here; with the work of colleagues in the restoration (it was completed in 1924) - but these are only guesses,Sharun himself did not say anything about the project, and the city archive was lost during the war. It is necessary for textbooks, for the edification of students - but it is forgotten! Scharun himself was certified by this complex when he went to Breslau (Wroclaw) as a professor at the Academy of Arts in 1925. And he passed and became one of four "color commissioners", or urban colorists, and the traveling exhibition "Color City" showed houses to the whole country.
The housing estate is divided into two unequal parts: a larger-scale "city" one along Kamsvik Alley (Gagarina St.), with a bridge square at the bridge over the Insterburg-Tilsit road - and a covered "private" street Pestry Ryad (Elevatornaya St.), with a couple of cottages and rows of semi-detached houses. We will find a similar solution in 1930 in his Berlin "City of Siemens", there is even a railway as here, and a quarter of a circle is described by an arc of one of the houses!
The entrance to the "village" from the bridge, above the railway moat - there is a platform and an overview. Sharun directs the view, takes into account the line of sight, covers up the irrelevant. Both "city" houses, standing here, have moved away from the red line, their street plastic is emphatically stingy - whatever you do, everything will disappear in a perspective reduction. Only the stairs are highlighted; the cheeks of trapezoidal niches face the entrance area. But the end facades are plastic, their diamond-shaped loggias with plaster frames in contrasting colors: this is the western side, the play of light and shadow under the changing sun here was probably very expressive - this can be seen even after glazing all niches by our contemporaries. And what is interesting: in terms of the house it is "stupid", and residents, Russians and Germans, perceive it as a sharp-nosed, "ship". Later, Sharun will have both a "battleship" house and a "liner", the windows will generally become a favorite motive, but this one is the first and, let's not be afraid of this word, the best. It is not literal, "shiplike" in it is created by the mass of the body, swaying on the waves - the course of the sun. The southern, courtyard side, all in deep loggias of a pentagonal plan, behind them are kitchens-dining rooms, and take out someone's table in the air, before your eyes there will be a good 200 meters of your own and neighboring gardens - they were covered from the street view! The war taught to put the question of food at the forefront, and here architecture guarantees both the non-shading of the dining table and the filling of it. But here are not just villagers, but residents of the new era, "on the floor", with an internal toilet and bathroom, a trolley bus in front of the door - and with a potato cellar and their own carrots. Benefit and beauty go hand in hand here.
Street Motley Ryad goes from north to south, and here the sun casts deep shadows from the slightest protrusions and recesses of flat triangular bay windows and plaster niches. There are houses without bay windows, there are houses with a couple and with two couples of them; there is a lancet staircase window in a wide leaf-shaped field, there is a triple niche, and there are also two-horned windows like a book or a whipped pillow. Scattered along the walls, doors and pincers are relief four- and eight-pointed stars - they are also on the railing of the stairs. And, of course, the walls are brightly painted, red, blue, yellow; each in its own way: platbands are out of order, all together create the uniqueness of each entrance and the village as a whole.
And they all start with two semi-detached houses with shops. All the rest are 4-apartment, these are for one family, a shop and a utility room. There are two entrances to the street, from the house and from the trading floor, and a wide display window. It is also put forward by a flat triangular bay window from the facade, with a cornice covering both doors. The wall here is lined with herringbone clinker, and all this was crowned with a semicircle of a hand-drawn signboard. The uniqueness of all this is in the completeness!
Have you all survived?
- Zhilmassiv originally consisted of:
• two-story curtain-arc near the bridge - lost during the war
• two three-storey "city" buildings. The "railway" house was lost during the war, the one that was built by the Society of Small Apartments remained
• two two-storey cottages - preserved
• 16 semi-detached two-storey houses - preserved
• "half-sheds" in the courtyards, 7 on each side of the street - lost after the war, some were replaced by new sheds and garages.
The houses are red brick, only one cottage is made of silicate bricks - and that was new then, it was produced only on the Rhine and Ruhr. A supply quirk or deliberate experiment is unknown.
The walls are stucco, and for the most part - in their original plaster. Find one in Berlin or Dessau! There the color was scratched out with a scalpel - we still see the original Kaimfarben paints. What modern paint will last 90 years - but this one could. As in the capitals. We expected this, the manufacturers - no, their archives burned down too. But I'm getting ahead of myself.
The partitions are also brick, reinforced-masonry in frames - "pruss masonry". All have survived. Basement ceilings - reinforced brick, reinforced concrete and in some places "Prussian vaults", above the basements - wooden beams. Both those and those have survived, but the reinforcement rusts and cannot be repaired, what to do is still unclear. Red tiled roofs, where they were repaired after the war - asbestos cement. The rafters with one puff, the double-row upright chair, all well preserved.
The stairs are all original, concrete in the basement, wooden above, with a wave-like railings in the spirit of expressionism. There is a linoleum path along the steps. From them - but from nothing else - the design drawing has been preserved, there on the stairwells sheathing or herringbone painting is shown, but we have not yet found any traces of this. Also, there are no traces of decoration in the interiors - and there were probably none, with the exception of decorated doors and stoves. Simple wooden frames have remained only in some places: they are replaced with plastic, and some of the windows of toilets and closets have been completely laid. The doors are also wooden, paneled and with windows - mostly preserved.
In other words: here not only the preservation is high, not only the stylistic and biographical value, but also the losses are quite recoverable. If there was not one significant "but".
Who belongs to the "Motley Ryad" now?
- All houses were privatized in the 1990s - with the exception of the former club in house number 17. It was not according to the project, it was rebuilt in the 1930s, there are raised walls and windows, and the roof there is different - "recumbent chair". It was a club even after the war, and then it was divided into apartments - it would be renewed, the cardboard partitions and amenities in the corridor would be removed … There is also a homeowners' association, supporting their homes - but he cannot save them: the inhabitants are small here.
How large-scale restoration is required? Will tenants need to be evicted?
- The actual restoration will be small - only the facades and roofs are protected. There it will be necessary to recreate the drawing of frames and dormers, and revive the plaster with painting. The rest is restoration repair. Insulate the walls from the inside, embroider communications. The stoves, since we are insulating ourselves, should be replaced by the quarter boiler room or by heat pumps to take over the basement logs. Become a model for the area, as in the old days! Many? - not at all! All these works can and should be carried out gradually, adapting to the tenants: this is how the villages of Uncle Tom's Cabin and Falcon Mountain were revived in Berlin: having made one house, move on to the next. And resettlement, if required, will be short-lived and no more than four apartments at a time.
Has the project already been completed, what amounts are we talking about?
- There are preliminary projects - student projects. There is no budget, and this is intentional. A multi-stage educational and practical approach was assumed. First, measurements - this was the summer practice in 2010 and 2011. Then - the development of design solutions. It is not finished yet. The experts who have already carried out similar work abroad (Brenne, Wasmut, Wolff and others) volunteered to be the consultant critics. Having selected the best moves and correcting them where necessary, we mark them and submit them for execution to the training workshops of old German construction crafts that are being created right there. Others will not fit here: the houses are not in accordance with GOST, the technologies are unfamiliar, some concepts we have and no analogue in the language. And in the Kaliningrad region there are hundreds of such objects, and everyone is waiting to learn how to make them. We can, fortunately, the houses are serial, in one year - on one house, in the next - on another, take into account what and how it will go. The students, the drafters of the projects, would lead these educational construction sites, and they themselves would study and teach others … Almost like in 1915, they would have found the old-new Prussian spirit!
In such a performance, there is a triple benefit. Ideally, a teenager from Elevatornaya, having gone to courses, would fix the roof of his grandmother on Elevatornaya, and then he would open his own craft workshop and build for others. After all, there will be demand for a new building of this kind. And we would have the very required responsible executor, and the customer is also responsible. After all, we are not rich in those and those …
What could be the future of Motley Ryad - an exemplary residential complex or something else?
- The revival of the "Motley row" is not a final mark, it begins with the first step of repair and restoration work and will not end with construction. After all, if just suddenly the houses are strengthened, insulated, renewed and refreshed, the “owner” will not emerge from the “consumer”, and a destructive cycle will begin again. To prevent this, the work is planned to be gradual and open. Even a name was invented: "Open Room"! It will be a construction site, a training center for new handicrafts, a design and presentation bureau, a residents' club with a museum exhibition, and even an "art residence", but it will be special.
Usually these words describe workshops where a visiting artist or designer creates, inspired by the city or by direct order, and the city dweller is present behind a shop window. The "open room" will become the complete opposite of them: the creator is not alone in the studio, he works in public, in the front garden, in the space of the street, in the Russian-German park named after Frida Jung. He is a student-trainee of art and construction universities, continuing to research these places or designing a new one; he is a master of any arts, he is a mentor in a classroom, he is an exhibitor in a residents' club, he is "one of us." Residents, helping him, are involved in the social and educational process, are activated for the city, the region … There are also far-reaching plans with the "Hombroich Island" near Dusseldorf, there is a plan for a traveling Sharunov scholarship: Chernyakhovsk - Wroclaw - Löbau - Berlin - Stuttgart. The "colorful row" should become a long-term engine of development and, of course, continue to live - the tenants should not be evicted in any case.
What has already been done to save the complex?
- Since March 2010, "Motley Ryad" is an identified monument of history and culture. Funds are needed for the final classification - they are collected by the Kamsvikus County Society. Students-trainees of "instrGOD" measured the buildings and made visualizations of their original appearance. Publishing and research activities are underway, returning buildings to professional memory - and not only to her: the complex was included in the list of 11 endangered monuments in Europe, compiled by EuropaNostra. I would like to get off this board of shame as soon as possible - but so far in no way.
Why has everything stalled?
- The work was stopped in July 2012, half a step away from success: that summer student groups were preparing reconstruction projects, the governor became interested, even started talking about the "Chernyakhov experience" of interaction between different professional and amateur groups. Had we handed over the projects then, we would have received funding for the first works, and in a few years of constant work we would have put together the necessary backbone. We were working on trust then, on the understanding that there is no way for us alone. And they ran into it: our prospect of governor's funding turned out to be too tempting for the Moscow Progressors, the group of Kartaeva and Zaborsky. They were recommended as specialists in strategic planning - I believed it, but they did not plan at all for a solidarity of mutual reinforcement by all. According to them, not through crafts and labor, the city must be raised, but through the magic of tourism, through the holidays. And the holidays - go ahead! Only one sonorous carnival, and now the rampart of tourists comes to us, and brings money, and happiness comes! Students were ripped off from drawing costumes, dancing round dances. The consultants who were waiting for the proofreading work were sent away, and even offered to delete the "Colorful row" from the monuments ("if it is so important to the Germans, so let them take care of it"). And as if in a mockery of the cautious solidity of the "insterGOD" nearby and instead of the ruined center, they proposed to build a Disneyland with bear dens, a windmill and a deliberate market … Such a miracle was not associated with the city at all, and why - a typical parasite. And next to it, the ruins of the city's true heart would stuck dejectedly. They never handed over anything to the governor, but they celebrated to their heart's content. The balance was brought together for a whole year. And the tourist did not come.
What is most needed now?
- The former activists, “instterGOD”, and new ones from different places, in the fall of 2013 founded the “Kamsvikus District”, now as a legal entity: you cannot leave these houses, this is a legacy and this chance in vain! We continue in the same spirit, albeit only in what we can reach ourselves.
Measurements are already in place. Projects must be done and they will be done. Samara and Kazan, students-restorers are knocking at the door, they want to design and build. The same is said in MARSH. The workshops from Görlitz are ready to teach us crafts - the regional schools are willing to accept them. Firms, the same "Kaym" and others, are ready to join. Cottbus University has contracted for scientific support and expertise: we succeed in attracting people, but no one risks making an unambiguous first step. It is difficult to blame the Germans for being cautious: to participate in such projects on their historically own land, which now does not belong to them … in our country they are already branded as revenge-seekers 10 times a day - the situation is no better on the other side of the border. Parity would be ideal: they are half - and we are half, then the result will certainly be common. Let the halves be of a different nature. They are teachers, we are classes; this will go. They are technologies, we are their place of application; this is also out of place. And so we apply for grants for applications, and the chances are not bad … But the first task for us, as Kamsvikus Districts, is to buy out a house on the street in order to receive the first artisans at a specific address, work within our own walls and remodel, if necessary.
As luck would have it, 4 apartments in different houses are now empty on the street, and one whole house is the smallest, a former shop at the entrance. It would be a wonderful signal house! There are already those willing to help in the restoration, to take the second and third and even the hundredth steps, but we need the first one: for 144 m2 of its area - to collect about two million rubles. So far, there is only a quarter of the required amount. If it had been, the object would have been working in just a week.
