05 juli 2020

Alicja Kwade, Anselm Reyle, Jorinde Voigt, Tomás Saraceno

"Thirty years ago, when the Berlin Wall came down, the city was left with huge swaths of empty buildings in the former East: old German Democratic Republic embassies and factory complexes, some still riddled with toxic waste. It was both a daunting and heady opportunity for Berlin to reinvent itself and start over. Artists and musicians moved into abandoned breweries, warehouses and basements and slowly brought new life to neighborhoods like Mitte, Prenzlauer Berg and Pankow, which in turn attracted people from around the world. But now, thanks to rising rents, Berlin’s gentrified areas have become too expensive for many of its creative residents, and people have begun to move to farther-flung corners of the city. Three such neighborhoods are the historically industrial areas of Treptow-Köpenick, Rummelsburg and Oberschöneweide, 10 or so miles southeast of the city center, where some of Berlin’s most pioneering artists now occupy a string of former industrial buildings along the Spree River.
...."


Alicja Kwade stores rocks and other oversize materials in one of the three large warehouses that she has converted into studio space in Oberschöneweide.


Alicja Kwade in her studio.



"....
She (Alicja Kwade) has occupied parts of her 9,500-square-foot studio in Oberschöneweide — three large warehouses, constructed with metal siding, bricks and glass, that she connected over time — since 2017 and remains grateful that she could afford a space big enough to accommodate both her large-scale installations and a living space.
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Owning so much space now allows for “more professional machinery, more experiments and more communal areas that add to the overall atmosphere in the studio,” she says. In the first warehouse, a large loft-like space with white walls and a small kitchen, she stores and displays an array of her work in various stages of completion.
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In the last building is her office, spread across three floors: The ground level is for communal eating and meetings; she stores architectural models of her installations on the second floor; and above is a small bedroom.
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The compound that the artist Anselm Reyle and the architect Tanja Lincke built on the Spree River in Berlin between 2012 and 2016.


Anselm Reyle’s studio, in a converted industrial shed on the Spree River in the Treptow-Köpenick area of Berlin.

"....
Though the house of the artist Anselm Reyle, 49, and the architect Tanja Lincke, 42, resembles a massive Brutalist concrete Greek cross, inside one has the sense of floating in the air: The structure is balanced 14 feet above the ground on sturdy concrete pillars that give the building views over the wide, slow-moving Spree River. Designed by Lincke, it was one of four structures that the couple built or restored on the more than two-acre compound where they live and work, a sprawling lot of riverside land in the area of Treptow-Köpenick that Reyle bought from the former German Democratic Republic Harbor Police in 2008 and planted with birches, sumac trees and clusters of long grass.
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A two-minute walk from the house along the river are the pair of connected industrial sheds, together 265 feet long, that Lincke renovated and turned into the couples’ working spaces: two airy studios, Reyle’s office and Lincke’s architectural practice.
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The artist Jorinde Voigt in the converted warehouse where she works on the banks of the Spree in Oberschöneweide.


Jorinde Voigt in the converted warehouse where she works on the banks of the Spree in Oberschöneweide.

"....
Jorinde Voigt took over a former warehouse in 2018 and established her current studio complex in a two-story steel-and-brick building fronted by a towering bank of windows. Just inside an industrial-scale double door, which she often leaves open to the river, Voight makes the conceptual drawings and collages.
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With the help of the architect Daniel Verhülsdonk, she created what she describes as “a huge hall which at first one feels swallowed up by” but that also contains a series of multifunctional, protected areas within it. They came up with the idea of making “houses within a house,” two distinct spaces within the cavernous main room. Massive, amphitheater-like steps lead up to a platform and then split off in opposite directions: left to the office and library; right to a series of lounges and private spaces.
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One of the two buildings in a converted chemical factory in Rummelsburg that the artist Tomás Saraceno now uses as his studio.


Tomás Saraceno in his studio.





"....
Within this studio’s two four-story buildings, Saraceno, who originally trained as an architect, has created multiple spaces that correspond to his diverse interests, which range from astrophysics to arachnology to the futuristic inventions of the 20th-century visionary Buckminster Fuller. He dedicates one floor to the making of his solar-powered sculptures, another to his Cloud Cities sculptures, and an entire wing of one floor to his Arachnid Research Laboratory, where hundreds of spiders spin webs in large glass tanks.
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(bron: The New York Times, foto's: Robert Rieger)

> Alicja Kwade
> Anselm Reyle
> Jorinde Voigt
> Tomás Saraceno

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