Vaissnavi Shukl
One of the ways in which we were taught history in the first few years of studying architecture was through documentation of historic structures. As a batch of thirty-six, we would travel to different parts of the country to measure mosques, temples, houses, even neighbourhoods and settlements in painstaking detail, and then make scale drawings of what we had measured. And proudly speaking, we did make some incredible drawings. Documentation through measuring and drawing was our way to learn about the construction details, proportions and scales, spatial organisation and the whole gamut.
Elsewhere in Germany, there was different pedagogy in action when it came to studying history. Twenty students at the Anhalt University of Applied Sciences, developed ideas for crime stories, to shed new light on the Workers’ Estate designed by Walter Gropius in Torten between 1926 and 1928. Led by Professor Natasha Meuser, this unorthodox approach to teaching helped the students gain a deeper understanding of the world famous row houses and became the genesis of  ‘The Torten Project: Murder and Crime Mysteries from a Bauhaus Estate’. And stay tuned all the way through as Sean Young reads one of the Torten stories to us.

I am Vaissnavi Shukl and this is Architecture Off-Centre, a podcast where we highlight unconventional design perspectives, practices, and research projects that reflect emerging discourses within the design discipline and beyond. Architecture Off-Centre features conversations with radical designers, thinkers, and changemakers who are redefining the way we live and interact with the built environment.

Okay, Natascha, so everyone knows Walter Gropius and the Bauhaus. But before we get into your studio project, do you want to introduce us to the Torten housing estate?

Natascha Meuser
Okay, Vaissnavi. Torten is really close to downtown of the South. It’s approximately ten minutes away from the famous Bauhaus building, the Bauhaus campus. And what is significant about it, almost nobody knows it. Because right now it doesn’t look like a Bauhaus anymore, but I will explain later. So in the 20s there was a significant lack of local mass housing in Germany or Europe and the need for new housing typology in 1928, in context with a heist hydro jetting defence, this is a nice German word, in a hypothetical sense. It means a social housing programme. The city of Dessau built together with a Bauhaus for Torten housing estate, it was a prefab development. Walter Gropius was the head of this programme, and he designed typologies for more than 300 terraced houses with his colleagues. This is actually the Torten real estate. And the houses almost in the beginning, when they built this real estate, of course, the house, the houses look completely the same. And meanwhile, they changed completely after the Second World War. The house itself is about 57 to 75 square metres. And this was actually a nice size for families that had houses had kitchens, and kitchen gardens and small animal stalls in the backyard. So each family was able to support them themselves by growing plants and entering the garden. And probably today, everyone is seeking for such an independent life with a little garden and animals in the backyard. So this is actually the Torten project. And what happened with it is, after the Second World War, nobody cared about this real estate anymore. No, but it was one of the flagship Bauhaus estates. So people just changed it the way they like to live in. So they changed the facades, the interiors, and only two or three of the original houses are still in their original condition.

Vaissnavi Shukl
Question, though, do you think it was originally designed for its inhabitants to modify? Or was it designed to adapt as per its user’s requirement? Or choices or liking? Or do you think it just happened, because?

Natascha Meuser
You know, there’s some pictures of the state and you see people out of the 20s, like rural people with rural closes in front of this modernism, Bauhaus building and… and if you look at this picture, you think about it doesn’t merge together. These are very normal people in front of this very aesthetic and modernist architecture, and what I think happened is, there was this need for mass housing, and, and that the architects were so keen to develop something new and fresh and modern, that they actually didn’t care about the inhabitants so much. They just want to create prefab houses with new technologies, with new materials. And in… in that specific size, I told you between 60 and 75 square metres. And but if you see the people living in these houses, it doesn’t merge together, because these people were living at the same time in very simple rural houses. So…

Vaissnavi Shukl
The only reason I asked that is because when you look at a lot of other housing projects around the world, and I’m specifically talking about two projects, one here in India, which is by BV Doshi, he won the Pritzker in 2018 and it’s called Aranya housing and it was designed as now the pep word is incremental housing, but I don’t think it was coined before at that time, but it was designed in a way where its inhabitants could add into it or modify it based on how they wanted to go about it. And then of course, you have Alejandro Aravena now with his incremental housing that goes on. So when I look at the Torten housing project, which is also one kind of mass housing project that was built with a certain intention in mind, my architecture brain goes into action and wonders whether it’s flexibility, or it’s the element of modification was ever considered at its design?

Natascha Meuser
But now, to be honest, it’s very stiff, it was a very stiff architecture…

Vaissnavi Shukl
Would you say its very German?

Natascha Meuser
Probably could be German as well. There’s not a lot of modification possible within the floor plans, but a lot of modification outside that means within the garden and the facade, and this is what happened. Because it was tiny and small, you couldn’t change that much interior walls or tear down the walls, it didn’t make sense, but the creativity the inhabitants developed, happened outside. This is why the 300 houses now a hundred years after…almost a hundred years after it was built, out of the 300 houses 298 look different. But they were meant to look alike. And this is very funny, because you can see all the hundred years of materials and new technologies and colours and patterns and so on. And this is where a lot of people do not realise that this is actually Bauhaus because there’s nothing left of our house, except these two or three buildings in its original shape.

Vaissnavi Shukl
So at the end of the day, it says the the occupants took over the building, and made it their own.

Natascha Meuser
Shouldn’t it be like this? I think it’s great, this is modern. What you said makes more sense, give the people a frame, and then they can start to build their own life within this frame. But this settlement was very stiff. It was pure aesthetic like these Bauhaus guys were thinking at this time, they were thinking about the aesthetics, how you walk down the street, and how the row houses, how the perspectives within the settlements are. But they didn’t think too much about the people. I swear.

Vaissnavi Shukl
The only reason I talk about architecture and situating this is because of your project. Use it as a segue to talk about what you did, and especially since this season, we are focusing very broadly on questions or themes of crime and violence and justice. The crime aspect of this comes into Torten, very interestingly through what you have done. So focusing on your studio project, you undertook a very interesting experiment with students, Anhalt University of Applied Sciences in which they developed crime mysteries set in the Dodman housing estate as a way to get a deeper understanding of the building typology. Now, this is a very radical approach to pedagogy in the sense that it is not often that we get to comprehend works of architects by turning their projects into crime scenes, you know, usually you just like go to a place and everybody goes with their measure tapes and books and you measure the whole thing, you picture it, and then you come back, you redraw it as a way to understand construction and spaces and record personal experiences. Or the other way to do is, you know, how we do mapping just different ways of mapping the whole thing, but what exactly was the studio brief? Can you walk us through the brief and maybe some of your favourite student projects?

Natascha Meuser
Okay, I will, you know, Torten is an architectural irritation to me. And I went there several times, and always thought it’s irritating of what happened. And I went there, in Dessau, so we have 60% of international students. And whenever I went on a field trip with students from India, or the United States, Australia, I don’t know, they were working with me down the streets, and they couldn’t understand why am I showing them these stupid little houses? I didn’t catch them, also within the problems and they went to a house and said, “Okay, that’s very simple, what’s the special thing about it?” And then I… I tried to find a method to make them curious about the problems, and curious about materials about the history of the buildings and so on, and then I developed the idea, you know, why not writing a story about the house and then my chance, you know, there’s a German word, the most famous crime television series is called ‘Tatort’, A scene of crime.

Vaissnavi Shukl
Oh, okay. Crime scene.

Natascha Meuser
Tatort and Torten somehow sound alike, and the words also look alike. So, it was a joke to say okay, Tatort Torten, crime scene in Torten. It’s a play with words, but it was very funny. So this was because I taught them by bringing a little bit of joy in it. And then I decided, okay, why not bringing the scene of crime, Tatort Torten. And I realised that suddenly I got more attention for the lectures for the explanations of the project. And we decided to do… to develop twenty different time stories within the study project, and they went to the Torten site, the design brief was actually very easy to determine, pick one house out of 300, draw it and then develop a crime story that fits to your house. And actually, it’s a very typical design approach, you analyse something, you draw something, then you write about something. But the special thing about…about this approach was that they had to develop their own story. And the story had to fit into architecture, and it was explaining architecture backwards. Yeah, I’ll give you an example. An example of the house… houses are very small, and the stairs are very small. And I said, if you now try to explain, if you murder somebody and you have to carry the body downstairs, then you have to pay attention. What kind of stairs? Are there? Is it wood? Is it stone? Is it loud? If you, is it making noise when you carry the body? Is the handrail good enough? No. And, and then what happened is, suddenly the students started paying more attention about the details, they looked more carefully, to the interiors and interior details, and how can I explain to you suddenly, it’s like, you open the eyes of the students for detailing by by letting them telling the story themselves. If I would tell a story, someone is listening, the other one is using the iPhone or whatever. But if they have to do it on their own, they get a deeper understanding. And no matter which cultural background they have.

Vaissnavi Shukl
This is very fascinating, because somebody else who we have on the season, his name is Geoff Manaugh. And he has written a book called ‘A Burglar’s Guide to the City’. And what he does is he looks at the city and buildings to the perspective of how a thief would look at it…a burglar particularly. Yeah, it’s very interesting, because he…he starts by saying that a thief and a burglar is very different. A thief could do his thieving activities quite literally anywhere. But a burglar requires a building to do what the activities that he wants… he or she wants to do. But he looks at buildings through the eyes of the burglar, and talks about how they’re all these different things that architects design that are not necessarily seen as conduits for criminal activities, but they tend to become conduits of criminal activity. So now when you’re talking about the Torten project as a… as a crime scene, I’m… I’m almost thinking about how it does make sense to look at architecture as a place of crime. Because while watching all these, you know, Netflix documentaries, on…on crime, and you know, evidence and all the traces that are left when an event take place, and suddenly, everybody who’s not an architect is talking about bathroom floors and finishes, and a speck of hair that’s in the rug, and stretch marks here and there. And it makes sense, because otherwise you don’t really think of a particular wallpaper in the room, or a particular tile over which you know, evidence stays or does not stay or fingerprints on certain material. So I totally get it. But it’s still very, very unconventional. And I was wondering if there’s a pet project that you want to talk about, and one of the student projects that you found very fascinating, especially the narrative aspect of it that looked at Torten as a crime scene.

Natascha Meuser
Yes, first of all, it is magic, what happens to the students because their attention is incredible if they…if they have a distance to their own project. Let me say a few words before I come to the story. Usually, if students design something, they’re so deep into their thoughts, and they have no distance to their design, and if they have to write about the design, it’s a disaster. If you let the students write about something different like a crime scene. Suddenly they open up their minds. This is what happens, this is the magic. And if they understand the way how to write stories and how to approach architecture, how to understand history, how to see and feel details, then they can refer all these experiences to their own design. This is the approach of this teaching studio. And this is what really, really that works, its magic. And that’s how they develop the stories in this book, actually, only we wrote more stories than are actually in the book. But the stories we picked out were all very different. And they had in common that comparison somehow dies, and it always plays in a very, it starts by approaching a house and, and discovering this murder and crime and trying to, to understand what has happened in the past Vaissnavi, may I ask you, should we record one or two stories in English?

Vaissnavi Shukl
We can do it. So what we can do is we can actually maybe put it towards the end of the episode, you know, like an appendix we can record the entire story and put it towards the end. Do you think that’s a good idea?

Natascha Meuser
Yes, that’s a good idea.

Vaissnavi Shukl
Time for a breather. And also time to plug in the trailer of our next episode with lawyer Shailly Agnihotri, who talks about Restorative Justice and the importance of a ‘Circle’ in the process.

Shailly Agnihotri
 “I love talking to an architect because I really do think of restorative justice this…this structural space that we create in a circle as also the structure of how we land this structure in the world, on solid footing, in some bedrock of human connection. So, so I do think of it as structures not only in relation to the environment, but also the structures that we create within the space of circle work.”

Vaissnavi Shukl
We’ll be here again in two weeks now, getting back to Natasha.

While going through stories in the book, I felt like a sense of safety or peace was presumed in the neighbourhood because of its architectural significance. This was a common thread in several stories, and it makes one think about the subconscious association that we make between the safety of a neighbourhood and its architecture. Is this an indicator of the effect of architecture on the human psyche, or just a result of a certain kind of community residing in these neighbourhoods? I think the one that I’m particularly referring to is the case to where the sergeant assumes nothing bad could happen in an architecturally beautiful neighbourhood. And, you know, it’s comparing this to the personality of the people to the personality or the symmetry of the houses. Do you think there’s a relation between the two?

Natascha Meuser
Well, you know, until the mid of the past century, the crime scenes always happened in the city, because we were thinking the city is better crime scene, because there’s so many people and something bad is going on, the bad people are only in the city, but crime scenes on the countryside started in the 70s. That’s what I read. That’s where the crime writers discovered the neighbourhood, the innocent neighbourhoods and Torten is one of these innocent neighbourhoods where you wouldn’t expect the crime scenes and this makes it even more interesting. And if you’re talking about the effect on the human psyche, of course, architecture always remains a shelter. That’s the function of architecture, architecture always remains a shelter. But the story we project into architecture is part of our psychology. That’s what I would say. And if you tell a story, it’s always important if you have a special connection of architectures, like the stage or the background for the seat, or for the stories, you imagine, that are happening in spaces.

Vaissnavi Shukl
So by default, I guess I can’t help but think about the role of storytelling and the role of fiction and the importance of creating a narrative in the design process that you conceptualise. What are your thoughts on replicating a similar process or a similar narrative in routine design practices out of the studio? Do you think this could be a potential way to design even outside of a speculative design that we do in studios?

Natascha Meuser
Definitely, in my opinion, and narrative always helps in the design process…the process No, no matter what stage and nevertheless my goal was that the students lose their own fear by telling the story so the narrative helps in the design process. I always see the students struggle very hard and I want to ease their pain by learning these narratives in the design process. So your question was, it doesn’t have to be a crime scene. It could also be a story. It’s only the way how to learn to write and and by writing, understanding architecture or what you’re doing and get service blog reflection, you reproduce on your on your drawing playdowns and, and, of course, the narrative to be Everything. In the past semester, for example, I asked the students to implement a personal detail from their childhood into their design, I asked them, so what was the most significant place in your childhood? And you cannot imagine one said it was the stairs because I was always playing on the stairs and other students said it was a window, my grandma always looked out of this window and told us children what to do while playing. And the other guy said it was a narrow courtyard. So each student is very individualised and very interesting and surprising, had one specific architectural detail. And then they use my customers, okay, now use this significant special place or detail and transfer it into your design, that this was also a very radical approach, because in the beginning, they didn’t know why should they use this detail in… in their design tasks. But then they also, magic thing happened. Same thing, like in the crime scene, it opened, they lost the fear. It’s always about losing fear of design processing of their own personal fields. I don’t know, it helps a lot. In very simple tool. I can only tell you, it helps a lot. It’s magic.

Vaissnavi Shukl
So on that note, a very curious question that I ask at the end of almost all the interviews. I’m kind of nosy that way. What’s next for you? And what’s next for the Torten project? I have… I know you have a new book coming up. So I would love it if you could tell us more about the book.

Natascha Meuser
Oh, probably you mean the Aquarium? I hope so, I’m doing several books right now.

Vaissnavi Shukl
 You can talk about the aquarium that I don’t know anything about but also the one with the rooms.

Natascha Meuser
Okay, I can talk about… referring to your question. Of course, I… I want to continue with my narrative teaching methods. And for the next semester, my students will, the design task is about public aquariums. And this time we start with Captain Nemo, probably, you know, the book, miles under the sea. And they have to develop design for the underwater world, in an aquarium building. And, again, I start with the narrative, okay, read the book, keep the name of and become the feeling of water for his idea for about this guy 150 or 170 years ago when he wrote this book, in what stage of mind was this guy? And why was it so special? And did he have a vision, which vision and so the dive in 2000 miles at the sea, and develop from this narrative from this story, their own design for a public aquarium, this is one book, I’m working right now on the public aquarium. And I’m also working on the history of interior architecture. This is a project we did last semester… semester was also really fantastic. We examined fifty historical buildings, from famous architects around the world, and through them through one single room out of these buildings or houses in the same way, like an axonometric few, the same. They all look alike. And it’s so fascinating. If you can walk through fifty rooms out of history, within hundred years, it’s like walking through a forest of ideas. It’s it’s, it’s, it’s…it’s fantastic.

Vaissnavi Shukl
I really look forward to both your upcoming studio and the book. But on that note of that, I also want to really thank you for being on the podcast and sharing your very exciting design process. Because I think when we came across your work, we were really caught aback there’s a studio that really looked at a modernist housing project as a crime scene and used it to speculate and imagine stories as a way of learning and that’s something that we hadn’t come across because usually you think about crime and other things very retrospectively, you know, it’s almost as a as a way to examine things to examine evidence and then the building is just a backdrop but doing it the other way where you look at the event to understand the building itself was very refreshing and very new and I also feel like it took away the pressure of you crime or death or murders for that, that, for that matter in a fairly lighter manner, like there wasn’t any distance that students had created between them and the building, I think they were living through the building via the lives of these characters that we had made up. So again, a very refreshing way to look at architecture and I just want to thank you for… for sharing your work with us.

Natascha Meuser
Vaissnavi, thank you very much for the invitation. I hope I reach many students and they will lose their fear by telling stories.

Vaissnavi Shukl
We’re not done here. You’ll now hear Sean Young’s voice as he reads us one of the stories from the book. This one’s called,
Insert reading.