Die Erde, eine gute Wohnung is an unusual international collaboration produced by Ewan Forster & Christopher Heighes and the Hebbel Theatre, Berlin (HAU) on one of Berlin's most extraordinary but undervalued housing estates - Bruno Taut's "Hufeisensiedlung" in Berlin Neukolln.
The site of the collaboration is one of Berlin's finest examples of utopian urban design and planning from the 1920's. The Hufeisensiedlung in Berlin Neukolln. Radical in both design and execution Bruno Taut's multi-shaded estate of apartments and family homes imagined an optimistic future for the working population of the Weimar years. Recently restored and listed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site the estate centres on a semi circle of three storey apartments constructed as a vast amphitheatre around a small central lake, its balconies and terraced gardens looking inwards, expectant of an imminent drama.
The collaborative pretext for an exploration of the Hufeisensiedlung is Bruno Taut's expressionist drama Der Weltbaumeister. Written in 1919 just six years before his designs for the Hufeisen it is the simplest rendering of Taut's architectural principles. Twenty-nine hand drawn images depicting the birth, disintegration and rebirth of a pure architectural form created in the cosmos and finally falling to earth, it has challenged and confounded many attempts at its interpretation and production over the last 75 years.
