B EAST Magazine website

By Joel Alas, B EAST editor

What happens when you squeeze together a boxy Soviet-style apartment with a pre-war Berlin living space? This seemingly impossible collision of floorplans representing different eras and ideologies has been achieved at a new temporary Berlin art space, with predictably chaotic results.

Architect-artists Matthias Rick and Markus Bader reconstructed the internal layout of a standard P2 apartment (the kind built by the DDR in their tens of thousands as mass housing projects) inside an existing inner-city apartment. Walls collide, passageways become constricted, doorways are rendered useless and space is wasted.

“The conflict between these two building types is very visible in Berlin,” says Matthias, who is part of Raumlabor, an experimental architecture and urban space group. Raumlabor set out to question the stigma attached to Soviet-era housing blocks, and to parody the promotion and advertising of new condiminium projects, which are marketed as a lifestyle choice rather than living spaces.

You can find the confusing combined apartment on display for two weeks as part of Torstrasse 166, a temporary exhibition in a vacant building in Berlin’s Mitte district.
Torstrasse 166 itself is a collision of ideas and ideologies. On the surface, the whole building appears to be a large squat taken over by artists who occupy each room with their concepts. Yet the whole project is funded by sponsorship, is heavily advertised and slickly promoted: Old Berlin activism meet New Berlin money and style. Is that bad? Not necessarily. The project itself is interesting, most of the art is great, and the artists have put thought into their work. That visitors must swallow a small dose of advertising is just a small reflection of the reality of funding art projects today.
And some of the apartments are used spectacularly, particularly the rooms criss-crossed with a dazzling web of string, painstakingly installed by the Berlin-based Japanese artist Chiharu Shiota (she is also responsible for the startling shoe installation on the building’s facade).
The courtyard bar was crowded for the opening party last Friday, and several more events are planned in the building throughout the duration of the exhibition, which runs until October 12.

Address: Torstrasse 166, Mitte, Berlin. U-bahn: Rosenthaler Platz.
www.torstrasse166.de

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