Rethinking Urban Space Through Architecture and Art: Innovation, Preservation and Sustainability in Modern Design
“Coming from the Art Academy we want to have a little bit of art always incorporated into every project. It’s always different: it can be something typical like art integrated into the building or meanwhile uses such as exhibitions before we start to build,” says Micky Damm who founded the architectural practice Studio Baukunst with fellow alumnus Philipp Bilke and their former professor, Karl-Heinz Petzinka. They now have 15 employees. “I studied architecture and fine art – sculpture at Kunstakademie.”
Their studio on Oberbilker Allee in Düsseldorf is a case in point. The bronze wheat sheaf entrance door handle sculpted by Joscha Bender provides a clue to the site’s origins and the practice’s ethos. “This used to be a farm a few hundred years ago called Leeschenhof. ‘Doff’ is village and ‘hof’ is farm.” He jests, “That’s all the German you need!” The two storey 1950s villa was refaced in natural stone. An attached single storey bow cornered building was formerly a DIY store.
Micky explains, “I started out as a graffiti artist in my teens. It was a good connection looking with my eyes on the city for spots to spray. I am still reading the city but instead of providing text somewhere I now build houses. Since we launched Studio Baukunst in 2018 it is about building a big dream. The funny thing is there are parts of north Düsseldorf where there is no graffiti at all. Outsiders would come in and go oh this is a good area. But it’s a boring area! No one has been there. So you often have graffiti as an indicator that something is going on. There is graffiti in Bilk, this area where our studio is located.” Graffiti was written on the fascia of the DIY store when it closed down. It translates as, “We don’t want to have gentrification here.” Studio Baukunst kept the graffiti. The parking bays to the rear are going to be removed and replaced with a pocket park. Striking green tiles are currently being wrapped round the ground floor exterior of the apartment building completing this urban block.
It’s hard not to talk about Bauhaus in a German architecture studio. Micky argues, “Bauhaus is influential in terms of straight and clear architecture and having big ideas in small spaces. So it’s all about the greatness of architecture – the decisions you have over everything. You always have to keep in mind what you are working on and not lose your way. The built Bauhaus projects are so great in all sorts of different dimensions: footprint, floorplans, materials. Everything follows one idea and this has been a huge influence on our way of thinking.”
But he thinks there’s a downside: “Right now I have problems with Bauhaus today because too many people use it as an excuse to build boring things. Money is no excuse. That was the nice thing about Bauhaus: you have great architecture in economic spaces. Today when people have the excuse we need more money to make something better I am like no! Lack of money is not a reason to build something that is not good. it just sets the parameters you are working with.”
Take his latest office scheme in the city: “When we design workspace we want to make it more interesting to attract the young people back into the office. So we create spaces that are so unusual that you would never have them at home in your apartment. We want it to be a benefit for employees to be in these special spaces. We have placed a tower of balconies linked by gangways to the front of an existing 1950s building. Every 500 square metres of internal office space has a 50 square metres balcony. We want to have office space outside too. So it is like you can talk on the open deck of your boat! We want to get away from the same boring spaces.”
This innovative approach flows from outside spaces through external walls to internal spaces. Micky says, “So for example here inside our studio we had the problem that there wasn’t enough concrete over the steel. We didn’t have the required 90 minute fire protection so we had to spray three centimetres of concrete onto everything. But instead of hiding the sprayed concrete we’re keeping it exposed. Ordinarily everything is completely different and we leave it that way. The rough textures of the walls contrast with the shiny floor. It’s good to get this together. In our projects every colour is usually the result of the material. Although there is a typical industrial green and a fire protection red so we make an exception and don’t count them as colours!”
Sustainability is such an overused word but like everything, Micky has his own original take on it. “What do we have to do so that things last very long? When we talk about sustainability it’s not really about how much insulation we put into the walls. It’s about how we develop the architecture as a whole so that it remains for a very long time because it has good spaces. We’re not so much about developing new forms. There are other practices doing that. We’re about cutting things out and making new collages together. Just as a DJ starts cutting out music and arranging new songs by putting them together that’s how we think about architecture.”
Are there any modern practices he admires? “Lederer Ragnarsdóttir Oei known as LRO in Stuttgart. What I like about them is that they have different projects of different sizes and they have different answers to the site specific questions. But you can always see their handwriting on everything. So they are following a bigger idea of architecture. Then there are other big architects you can go to and ask for a Bauhaus house, a classical house, any style of house. If you do everything what is your own idea of architecture? So I do like the architects that have their own idea of practice and are not just doing development for others.”
Micky’s tour of his studio ends on a high in the new glasshouse on top of the villa building. “There are so many lines that are happening. The staircase or ‘water tower’ with the round form doesn’t care about all the structure lines of the house. It’s just here. Every rectangle aligns in this glasshouse but the round water tower is just there. You walk up the stairs through the dark then you open the door and you have the light of the glasshouse. And that’s the idea of architecture, experiencing how spaces can change. It’s about the space beyond the floorplan too.”
