Draw Love Build - výstava Sauerbruch Hutton v berlínské AdK

From the end of this October until mid-January next year, you can see an extensive exhibition at the Berlin Academy of Arts entitled “draw love build“, mapping the thirty-five-year history of the Sauerbruch Hutton studio. The eponymous exhibition was first presented three years ago on the occasion of the completion of the M9 cultural center in Mestre, Italy. In the first half of this year, Sauerbruch Hutton prepared a retrospective exhibition “drawing in space“ at the Berlin Museum of Architectural Drawing, “where space becomes drawing and drawing becomes space, and visitors literally find themselves in the tension field between image and sculpture, surface and depth.” Unlike the Italian exhibition, the display at the AdK has been given the subtitle “tracing modernities” and, in addition to sixty projects from Sauerbruch Hutton, it has been expanded to include sixteen works from the extensive collections of the AdK. The curator of the exhibition was the Dutch architect Dirk van den Heuvel from the research consortium “Architectural Archives of the Future“ at the Delft University of Technology, who, alongside works from the Berlin studio, helped select nearly century-old exhibits from the extensive AdK archive, including works by Erich Mendelsohn, Hugo Häring, Hans Scharoun, and Ludwig Leo, placing their primarily hand-drawn sketches in new perspectives with contemporary digital images.
As a result, it is a dual exhibition that, in addition to a monographic presentation of over thirty years of work by Sauerbruch Hutton, also traces the “footprints of modernity,” offering direct comparisons to some fundamental principles of various modernities and allowing the tracing of various continuities, affinities, and deviations. The vast AdK archive (13 km of shelves of archival materials, 1.5 million photographs, 650,000 different media, 75,000 art objects) serves as both inspiration and reference point.
The title of the exhibition “draw love build” is also a creed that has governed the Sauerbruch Hutton studio for over three decades in realizing sustainable and unique designs. The term “draw” can also be understood as drawing inspiration from a given place and intervening in the respective context, while the word “love” embodies the aim of inhabiting our planet sustainably, and “build” strives to create sensory-stimulating places.
“By allowing access to the AdK archive, surprising dialogues have been created between architectural views from the first half of the 20th century and the present. The perspectives of nearly a century ago from the then progressive generation serve as inspiration and a benchmark for current architecture, which seeks to address today’s ecological and social issues. The exhibition offers a comprehensive path that visitors can explore more deeply through a special computer application, which provides instant access to additional supplementary information such as texts, drawings, photographs, and films. Thus, a visit to the exhibition can be arranged flexibly and tailored thematically or in scope to each visitor. Additionally, a separate room screens the film “Sauerbruch Hutton Architekten” by German filmmaker Harun Farocki (1944-2014) from 2013, which documents the daily life and working methods of the office. On Sundays, families can join “Kunstwelten,” which is a children’s workshop dedicated to creating an urban landscape. The outcome of the Sunday workshops is the project “Biopolis - the residential city of the future.”
The British-German architectural duo met while studying at the London AA in the early 1980s. Louisa Hutton subsequently gained work experience at the studio of Alison and Peter Smithson, while Matthias Sauerbruch opted to work in the office of Rem Koolhaas, where he was particularly involved in the Berlin apartment building project Checkpoint Charlie as part of the International Building Exhibition IBA 87 in the vicinity of the eponymous border crossing between East and West Berlin. After the fall of the Berlin Wall and winning the competition to expand the headquarters of the GSW (Publicly Beneficial Company for Settlement and Housing Development), they decided to permanently relocate to Berlin, which, after the reunification of Germany, offered many construction opportunities, allowing Sauerbruch Hutton to refine their colorful organic design handwriting.

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