Space as Membrane by Siegfried Ebeling
Architectural Association I
Contents
i–xii
Membrane and Ecological Architecture Walter Scheif fele
1–36
Space as Membrane Siegfried Ebeling
xiii–xxiii
Future Skins Spyros Papapetros
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Siegfried Ebeling biography Walter Scheif fele
Space as Membrane by Siegfried Ebeling
Edited and with an afterword by Spyros Papapetros
Introduction by Walter Scheiffele Translated by Pamela Johnston
Architectural Association London
Space as Membrane by Siegfried Ebeling
Edited and with an afterword by Spyros Papapetros
Introduction by Walter Scheiffele Translated by Pamela Johnston
Architectural Association London
Membrane and Ecological Architecture walter scheiffele
In 1930 the model of a round metal house was presented in New York to a select gathering of architects. Its designer was a certain Siegfried Ebeling and the model, so it was said, had been produced in Dessau.1 The architects didn’t quite know what to make of it or the design culture it had emerged from. Although the young Philip Johnson had reported a few years earlier that the Bauhaus in Dessau was a ‘mecca for modern architecture’, scant information filtered through about the radical new construction methods then being explored in Germany.2 The previous year Buckminster Fuller had exhibited his own metal house in New York – a proposal that displayed a number of similarities to Ebeling’s design – and perhaps because of this precedent, Ebeling’s subsequent appearance in New York has remained largely unnoticed. But now he seems to be staging a return of sorts, with this translation into English of his text Raum als Membran (Space as Membrane), which was originally published in Dessau in 1926. Like his architectural models, Ebeling’s utopian text was received with little fanfare and enjoyed only modest contemporary success. Revealing the same combination of the terrestrial and the cosmic, both display a radicalism that we are only now coming to appreciate.
Ebeling could similarly be seen as both embedded in and removed from the earth. His cosmic orientation is as evident as his rootedness, even if he was clearly inclined towards the spiritual (he was too close to Klee during the Bauhaus foundation course to be anything else). This feeling was also reinforced by the fascination that the most technically advanced machine of the age – the airplane – exerted on the young generation. Ebeling recounted the excitement he and his brother (a mining engineer) had felt at Orville Wright’s first flights over the English Channel. In his brother, too, Ebeling observed a simultaneous proximity to and distance from the earth: ‘This was a man, not yet 30 years old, who was used to reporting for duty 1,000m or more underground, installing adits and gravity planes, standing in wet sunken shafts like a good mining man, but at the end of the work day or after a few snatched moments of sleep, this same man would be hungry for light and height, and he would devote his thoughts to the new technology of flying, in search of an equilibrium, a way to restore the wholeness of man.’4 Ebeling’s work was itself largely defined by this conception of the whole man and the attempt to bring humanity and housing into a cosmic relation. Traumatised by the First World War and his wartime imprisonment, Ebeling arrived at the Bauhaus in Weimar in 1922. He landed right in the middle of the dispute over the future direction of the school. Should the Bauhaus students develop their artistic subjectivity in a protected space, or instead, as directed by Walter Gropius,
weimar bauhaus
Paul Klee once compared himself to the German expressionist Emil Nolde, saying that whereas Nolde was an earth-bound daemon, he himself was a spirit elevated above the ground. 3 Viewed in these terms,
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series of lectures at the Volkshochschule in Bielefeld in 1932 and 1933, Ebeling discussed and criticised the bases of a scientific theory that had formed the spiritual framework of the modern era since the time of the Enlightenment. ‘You are all aware that Goethe hated only ONE man and fought him with a quite uncharacteristic passion – and that was Isaac Newton, the English natural philosopher! In terms of the history of ideas, who was Goethe, who was Newton? Goethe was the man who like Leonardo stood in the wholeness of life, who attempted to maintain the balance between the mythical forces that assail the earth from within as well as materially, and who managed to strike a balance, if only in the constant repelling and overcoming of a one-sided displacement of gravity… And who, on the other hand, was Newton? … Newton demythicised science and presented his proofs in the manner of a scholastic lawyer.’25 Ebeling would have derived these thoughts from the ‘complaint’ against the rationalist age voiced in Ludwig Klages’ text on ‘Man and Earth’.26 Klages quotes the forerunners of environmentalism in a passage that attempts to overturn the cause-effect principle of classical science, removing the emphasis from the effect and placing it once more on the cause: ‘whoever, along with Newton, seeks the source of the event solely and exclusively in the principle of calculable and quantifiable changes in processes, disregards the effective cause and thereby basically throws away the possibility of ever uncovering the conditions of the processes themselves, whether these lie in motion, or in some deeper substrate. He no longer asks the reason why something happens, but instead, postulating the event complete with its conditions, asks, why does the speed of something change?’ 27 From Nietzsche to Klages, from Steiner to Heidegger, the many philosophi-
in the usa
Ebeling’s round house found its way to New York in the form of a model – images of which (alongside Erich Mendelsohn’s office buildings and Otto Bartning’s steel church) permeated only as far as the Copper & Brass Research Institute’s 1931 bulletin report on metal house designs by European, and particularly German, architects.22 In the circles of the American Institute of Architects and the Architectural League, where Buckminster Fuller had recently delivered a lecture on the Dymaxion House, the design was seen as an interesting ‘laboratory experiment’ which was ‘too radical for the usual school of American architecture’.23 The vice-president of the institute, James M Hewlett, indicated that his son-in-law, Buckminster Fuller, had been working on a similar project for a number of years. It is highly probable that Fuller was made aware of Ebeling’s design at this time and there are obvious overlaps between Fuller’s Dymaxion House and Ebeling’s circular house in terms of their punctiform installation, transportability and energy-exchange capacities. But did Ebeling also know something about Fuller? The Junkers archives contain a 1930 report by Theodor Morrison on a ‘house of the future’ – Fuller’s Dymaxion House, focusing on its walls and floors formed by gas-filled caseins – which concludes with an image of the future that would have been particularly appealing to any architect working in an airplane factory: ‘if the gas-filled principle is developed further, then we will perhaps soon have dirigible houses in which we will be able to travel to Europe whenever we want, returning from below the clouds to our anchoring mast.’ 24 fundamental critique of the modern
But how can the impulses that Ebeling drew from technology, science and art be incorporated into a theory of construction? In a
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cal writings critical of reason – a philosophy of life that touches on mystical as well as völkisch-nationalist thinking – define a field that seemingly enables a transition from physics into a renewed metaphysics. According to Ebeling, this must be the basis for any theory of building. The ‘metaphysical content’ of space, stripped away by ‘Newtonian mechanics’, had to be restored. This was also the background against which Ebeling’s quarrel with modernism and with the Bauhaus was played out: ‘Say Yes! to the theoretical worldview of modern man, for which Newtonian mechanics laid the groundwork and countless scientists, laboriously piling up material on material, carried over into countless other areas of life and compacted into a fixed structure. Say Yes! to the worldview propagated by newspapers and journals both in Germany and abroad, and particularly in America, day in day out, so that there is no turning back, so that the consequence drawn by a ‘‘Bauhaus’’ is correct and therefore also ethically good!’ 28 Ebeling broke away from this Bauhaus and this modernism in 1947 in his last text, Extra Muros: Introduction to the Theory of the Free House. He got no further towards the construction of his worldview. The final sentence of Extra Muros is ‘The form will follow the idea.’29
settled upon the real estaters’ sewers like hens on glass eggs. They did not inquire into the economic patterns governing research, production, tooling, airframe and power plant, and distribution. In short, they only looked at problems of modification of the surface of end products, which end products were inherently subfunctions of a technically obsolete world.’ 30 –R Buckminster Fuller In many ways Fuller’s provocative criticism of the Bauhaus overlaps with Ebeling’s, to the extent that Ebeling saw himself ‘always in opposition against the “Bauhaus” … because it was not technical or scientific enough and as a consequence got mired in stylistic snobbery’.31 Fuller’s objection to the Bauhaus ultimately culminated in the question: ‘Does only one of them publish what his buildings weigh?’ 32 In fact the weight of the Bauhaus buildings, though they appeared light and hovering to the viewer, must have been considerable. One can put Fuller’s quote in perspective by substituting the modernism offered by the broader region of Dessau for that provided by the Bauhaus school alone, so that the former includes the technical modernism of the Junkers factory and the utopian modernism of Siegfried Ebeling. One feels sure that this strand of modernism would have been able to provide an adequate response to Buckminster Fuller’s question. Ebeling’s utopian-architectonic thinking necessarily moves between reason and myth, between intuition and irrationality, and at times flits aimlessly about. The extent to which it can be evaluated as a pioneering work for a future stage of ecological building is a question that requires much discussion still. But this new translation of Space as Membrane should provide all the impetus we need.
conclusion
‘The Bauhaus international school used standard plumbing fixtures and only ventured so far as to persuade the manufacturers to modify the surface of the valve handles and spigots and the colour, size and arrangement of the tiles. The Bauhaus international school never went back of the wall surface to look at the plumbing, never dared to venture into printed circuits of manifoldly stamped plumbings. They never inquired into the overall problem of sanitary functions themselves. They
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Endnotes 1. Walter Scheiffele, ‘“You must go there’ – Reaktionen der Zeitgenossen’ in M KentgensCraig (ed), Das Bauhausgebäude in Dessau 1926–1999 (Basel: Birkhäuser, 1998), p 119. 2. Philip Johnson, letter to Louise Johnson, 18 October 1929, quoted in Franz Schulze, Philip Johnson: Life and Work (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), p 55. 3. Paul Klee, Das bildnerische Denken, edited by Jürg Spiller, (Basel: Schwabe, 2nd edition 1964), p 24. 4. Undated autobiographical sketch, estate of Siegfried Ebeling. 5. Siegfried Ebeling, ‘Kosmologe Raumzellen: Ideen zur Ethik des konstruktiven Denkens’ in ‘Junge Menschen’, a special issue of Bauhaus Weimar 5:8 (November 1924), reprint Kraus: Hamburg, 1980, p 173. 6. J J P Oud, ‘Über die zukünftige Baukunst und ihre architektonischen Möglichkeiten’ in Bruno Taut, Frühlicht. Eine Folge für die Verwirklichung des neuen Baugedankens (Ullstein: Berlin, 1963), p 207. 7. See Walter Scheiffele, bauhaus, junkers, sozialdemokratie: ein kraftfeld der moderne (Berlin: form + zweck, 2003) and in particular ‘hugo junkers und die systematische bauforschung für das metallhaus’ and ‘metall und membran’. 8. Kasimir Malevich, Die gegenstandslose Welt (Berlin: Reihe neue Bauhausbücher, 1980), p 13. 9. Newspaper cutting with Bruno Taut’s review of Der Raum als Membran, estate of Siegfried Ebeling. 10. ‘Forschungsprogramm zur
Reformbauweise’ (Research Programme for the Reform of Construction Methods), 17 December 1926, Deutsches Museum, Munich, Junkers Archive, Juhaus 1067. 11. Siegfried Ebeling to the director of the Institute of Physical Chemistry at the University of Leipzig, 17 April 1926, estate of Siegfried Ebeling. 12. Ibid. 13. Rago Torre-Ebeling in conversation with the author, 21 December 2009. 14. Ise Gropius’s diary at the Bauhaus Archive Berlin, p 113. 15. On Mies’s reading of Ebeling, see Fritz Neumeyer, Mies van der Rohe on the Building Art (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991), pp 171–79. Wulf Herzogenrath elaborates on Ebeling’s role in utopian projects developed in the Bauhaus. Bauhaus Utopien: Arbeiten auf Papier, edited by Wulf Herzogenrath with the collaboration of Stefan Kraus (Stuttgart: Cantz, 1988), pp 267–74. See also Papapetros notes 6 and 8 in this volume. 16. www.tanzarchiv-leipzig. de/?q=node/399, accessed 27 December 2009. 17. German Copper Institute (Grünfeld) to Siegfried Ebeling, 1 August 1928. 18. ‘Das Ganzmetall-Rundhaus’, Metallwirtschaft, X:23 (June 1931), pp 467–68 and Siegfried Ebeling, ‘Ganz-Metallhaus über dem Kreis’, Stein, Holz, Eisen 17 (August 1931), pp 330–33. 19. Siegfried Ebeling, ‘Ganzmetallhaus über dem Kreis’, typescript, 1931, p 2, estate of Siegfried Ebeling. 20. Ibid, p 3. 21. ‘Ein Tanzereignis von 1927’, undated newspaper article, estate of Siegfried Ebeling.
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22. Bulletin of the Copper & Brass Research Association 62, 15 January 1931, p 16. 23. William M Crane Jr to B B Caddle, memorandum of 18 July 1930, estate of Siegfried Ebeling. 24. Theodor Morrison, ‘Das Haus der Zukunft’, typescript 1930, Deutsches Museum, Munich, Junkers Archive, Juhaus 857, p 18. 25. Siegfried Ebeling, ‘Extra muros’, typescript 1933, revised 1940/41 (the text is not identical with that of the published version of 1947), p 19. 26. ‘Ludwig Klages’ in Philosophielexikon (Stuttgart: Rowohlt, 1995). 27. Siegfried Ebeling, ‘Extra muros’, p 24. 28. Ibid, p 28. 29. Siegfried Ebeling, Extra Muros: Einleitung in die Theorie des Freien Hauses (Hamburg: Phönix Verlag Christen & Co, 1947). 30. R Buckminster Fuller, ‘Influences on my Work’, 1955, in Joachim Krausse and Claude Lichtenstein (eds), Your Private Sky: R Buckminster Fuller: Discourse (Zurich: Lars Müller, Zurich, 2001), pp 60–61. 31. Siegfried Ebeling, biographical notes, Munich, 10 September 1934, estate of Siegfried Ebeling. 32. R Buckminster Fuller, ‘Influences on my Work’, op cit, p 64.
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