21 juni 2014

André Butzer









"In the two decades following the fall of the Wall, artists from all over the world have descended on Berlin, drawn to the city by inexpensive rents and abundant vacant industrial buildings. Some, like the painter Andre Butzer, 38, have broken the mold. Butzer moved to Rangsdorf, a small village of 12,000 people about 45 minutes south of Berlin, in 2006, when he bought the former Bucker Aircraft Factory and started converting it into a unique live/work environment.

It was a major decision, not only in terms of capital investment but also in terms of his psyche. Bücker-Flugzeugbau GmbH, founded in 1932, was a manufacturer of small planes, many subsequently used as trainers by the Luftwaffe during World War II. Adjacent to the factory was the Rangsdorf airfield, where Officer Claus Schenk Graf and his brother Berthold Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg, conspirators in the July 1944 plot against Adolf Hitler, took off from after their failed attempt to plant a bomb at the Fuhrer’s briefing hut at the military high command in Rastenburg, East Prussia.

Hitler survived the bomb blast and the coup failed. Subsequently, Claus was executed by a firing squad; Berthold, however, and eight other conspirators were hanged in Plotzensee Prise, Berlin. According to historical accounts, Berthold was strangled and then revived multiple times and the gruesome execution and resuscitation sequence was filmed for Hitler to view at his leisure.

Butzer knows the site’s history well. The factory was designed by Herbert Rimpl, one of the most important industrial architects of the Third Reich. Rimpl was a student of Paul Klee and at one point in his career 1000 architects worked for him. Although many of his buildings were destroyed in the war, the factory was spared because it was south of Berlin and most bombs from the British army came from the northwest. By 1936, flat-roofed buildings like the Bücker factory were already outlawed by Hitler who preferred pitched roofs that echoed the architecture of German chalets.

Rangsdorf was important. When the bombing of Berlin was intense, Butzer explained, they closed the Berlin airport and Rangsdorf was the main airport to the city. There was a time when one could fly to China and Italy from Rangsdorf.

In the 1940s, there were forced labor camps at the airport, with Ukrainians, Russians, and Poles working there. Prisoner-workers were housed in wooden barracks.

The Russians used the building after the war, from 1945 until 1994. In the 12 years that followed, vandalism and the weather destroyed the buildings, which ironically had survived the war, never having been bombed.

Butzer first heard of the site through the architect Johannes Sollich. Sollich was a doctoral student whose research centered on Rimpl’s importance during the Third Reich and afterward in post-wartime Germany. “The challenge of the Butzer renovation was to revitalize a military area with important historical monuments into a very personal place for an artist family with very strong characters,” says Sollich. “The Rangsdorf buildings are unique –one of the few remainders of this era.”

For Sollich, who also renovated an old officers’ mess (built for a tank company in 1936) for the artist Thomas Zipp near Berlin, the goal is not only to restore buildings but rather “to make a modern interpretation of special buildings or sites.”

As Butzer would find out, buying the property was complicated. While the purchase price was cheap –about 200,000 euros, the contract that he had to sign required that he invest heavily, with the government overseeing the three-year long renovation.

Ultimately, he spent more than 2.5 million euros to restore two of the buildings on the property, one for his home and the other for his studio. The bank would not give him any money for the project and he had to pay for it with money earned from art sales. With a global network including dealers in Germany, Japan, France, Switzerland, Austria, Spain, Portugal, Italy, United Arab Emirates, Finland, and the United States (where he is represented by Metro Pictures in NYC), Butzer prefers to handle all of his business himself, from Rangsdorf. The wall calendar over his desk is always set one day ahead. “I started doing this when I was in school. It’s better that way,” he says.

To purchase the site, Butzer had to agree not to sell the property for a long time. “They did not want to encourage it as an investment project.” Although he can sell it legally after 16-20 years, his plan “is to keep it forever. I might live somewhere else but I will always come back to Rangsdorf.”

The 1935 factory building with its two story steel skeleton and 140 windows is now his home. After demolishing an extension, he gave serious thought to the building’s color. “The original building was white,” Butzer says, “but I could not do that here. White would have been wrong.” Instead, he chose grey—a compromise between the German white and the Russian blue. The living room has a piano, a play area for his two children, and a dining table that is 21 feet long. “We only occupy one end,” Butzer says.

Butzer transformed the officers’ canteen from 1938 into his studio. Designed by an unknown architect, its façade includes a raised relief of Maxim Gorky, who Butzer points out, “loved books and was a fountain of knowledge.” The 1,000 square meter building now houses a huge studio that is both clean and sparse, an office, and a small apartment in the back for visitors.

A third building on the property from 1942, with prominent blue columns, remains as it was when he bought the property. Once the social building where soup was served to the workers, Butzer’s plan is to eliminate a floor and turn the building into a museum." (bron: Guernica)


André Butzer in zijn atelier. (bron: Diane Pernet)

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