GABU Heindl Architecture

The beginning
partnering up without knowing each other before, two architects, Gabu Heindl and Manfred Hasler, and four students of stage design, Ece Anisoglu, Jakob Brossmann, Julia Miglinci and Johannes Weckl, joined for the experiment of a grass-roots democratic process of designing the remodeling and new start of the experimental theatre brut following former dietheater.

The concept
collective authorship Collectively we began an intensive, investigative and critical examination of the found situation. Ideas about what to keep and how to change were collected, circulated and improved through radical exchange and altering of individual ideas. Not the taste for a specific architecture but its attitude and performativity drove our search. The idea of a continuous construction site began to become content and form.

Dismantling / Remodeling / Do-It-Yourself Construction
Rather than in the mode of modernistic “tabula rasa”, the re-modeling of the brut theatre is based on revealing layers of history within the space and emphasize its characteristics. Selected walls are being scraped and stripped, in order to find what was before. What atmospheres, materials, lights, sounds, smells have been assembled throughout time?

Found / Recycled / Developed
We find marks, scratches, blots, dots, with proper characteristics, which could not have been designed. Low budget forces us to look precisely and to reassess what could be re-used: various used lamps are re-assembled, in our heads and in our hands, to an enormous new (up-cycled) luster for the theater. While we are discussing the reversal of inside and outside, the neighboring restaurant gets rid of an outdoor wooden terrace: hence, their old and worthless wood becomes the material for the new floor and bar counter of the new brut bar. The weathered raw material only needs few conceptual parameters to create new complexity: With few mechanical forces, like sanding it, its bent edges and uneven graying create a floor pattern, which also could not have been designed or foreseen. Additionally we build boxes from untreated wood, which will soon collect traces of use, while they move through the space and function as space-markers of all kind: used differently for performances and openings, for meetings and discussions, or when the foyer becomes a dance-floor.

Last-but-not-least: no end
Within an often smooth and over-designed cultural landscape, brut is rough, haptic and unfinished; meant as an ongoing invitation to take hold of the space and use it as a site for dispute, to leave traces and to change it. (Text: Manfred Hasler, Gabu Heindl, konstantin gabel)