Book recommendation: Immerse yourself in the world of the 1920s
With Tautes Heim, Katrin Lesser and Ben Buschfeld have created a rentable museum for architecture and design from the 1920s. In their book “Tautes Heim — Stories & Details”, they allow readers to delve deep into the history of its creation and the design details.
Tautes Heim [Taut’s Home – a pun on German Trautes Heim Glück allein, meaning Home Sweet Home], a house in the Hufeisensiedlung [Horseshoe Estate] in Berlin-Britz designed in line with the ideals of architect Bruno Taut, claims to be a museum, but functions like a holiday home.
After years of meticulous restoration by landscape architect Katrin Lesser and designer Ben Buschfeld, the heritage listed end-of-terrace house has continued to wonderfully convey the lifestyle of the 1920s since 2012.
In their newly published book, the two heritage enthusiasts describe the story of the restoration, which has won multiple awards, and use 60 interior design objects to paint a vivid panorama of that eventful era.
The work, which is divided into two sections and includes 120 illustrations, impressively conveys how the idea of a “tauted” house [an idiom established by Bruno Taut around 1919; people at the time talked about “tauting” their home], what hurdles had to be overcome, and what makes this World Heritage Site so special.
The stories of individual pieces of furniture and equipment are then used to develop a vivid panorama of this eventful era. The objects, each of which is described with a picture and a short text, include well-known design classics from the 1920s as well as typical kitchen utensils, furniture with additional uses, and objects with an interesting history.
Where no authentic furniture was available, the team used their own designs based on historical photographs. The decision-making processes and details of the restoration are also vividly explained.
The 80-page book, illustrated with 120 photos, Tautes Heim – Story and & Details was published by Verlag für Berlin-Brandenburg (vbb) at the end of January 2025.
Katrin Lesser is a freelance landscape architect. She follows in the footsteps of her great-grandfather Ludwig Lesser, who planned the Falkenberg Garden City with Bruno Taut and designed important parks in Berlin and Brandenburg between 1902 and 1933. One focus of Katrin Lesser’s work is the preservation of garden monuments. In addition to conducting expert analyses and preparing expert reports on the Hufeisensiedlung and other 1920s developments, she has managed many construction sites and restorations of heritage listed gardens and open spaces in Berlin, Hamburg and Brandenburg, as well as preparing, editing and authoring inventory reports, maintenance plans, genre inventories and specialist books on Berlin heritage listed gardens.
Ben Buschfeld runs a studio for graphic, interface and communication design. Creatively versatile, he works as a designer, activist, curator and project author in the field of architecture and heritage education. He has worked on the “Siedlungen der Berliner Moderne” [Settlements of Berlin Modernism”] several times: in 2011 he created the exhibition at the Infostation Hufeisensiedlung [Horseshoe Estate Information Centre], followed in 2015 and 2020 by the architectural guide “Bruno Tauts Hufeisensiedlung” and the website welterbe-siedlungen-berlin.de. Buschfeld is involved in various networks. He is co-founder of KulturerbeNetz.Berlin and is both a curator and organizer of the “Triennale der Moderne” festival in Weimar, Dessau and Berlin.
Editor: Ulrich Stefan Knoll
Photography: © Ben Buschfeld (except portrait © David Burghardt)
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