The Kunstgut –
Stranger Than Paradise

© Image Noshe 

Upon our arrival, a gardener – a little worse for wear – is raking and plucking at the first spring growth under the birch trees and sumacs. Is his baseball cap with its beige-brown GG pattern genuine Gucci, or a well-done fake? Whatever – he certainly looks cool! And it’s a perfect match for the studio of an obsessive researcher of dubious taste, kitsch, and camp like Anselm Reyle. Here comes Tanja Lincke, Reyle’s wife, for whom the expression “a natural beauty” might have been coined. Not much later, the master himself comes round the corner, apparently rather less of a morning person than his spouse, a steaming AC/DC coffee mug from his hard rock collection in hand. Translated into sound, the mug’s design would deliver 140 decibels – just shy of a ruptured eardrum.

© Image Noshe 

Before we embark on our tour, the couple gives a quick overview of the basic history of the place. While searching for a new studio in 2008, Reyle discovered the East German river police’s former shipyard in Treptow, a large site surfaced with thick concrete surrounded by industrial buildings both large and small, some already in ruins. Reyle could hardly believe his good fortune. “Such a large property, right on the waterfront, with a panoramic view of the River Spree, plus a road lined with old trees,” he says. “I didn’t think we’d be able to afford it anyway.” But the idyll came with a catch, one that turned out to be its saving grace for the artist: “No one knew exactly how badly the ground was contaminated with industrial chemicals. It was on the official list of contaminated sites when the city auctioned it off. So everyone left it well alone. Only I was naive and risk-loving enough to say: Fuck it, I’ll take it, I’ll never find a piece of land like this again.”

© Image Noshe

Reyle grins. As is her way, single-minded Lady Luck smiled on him. “The contaminated area turned out to be very manageable when specialists examined the site after the sale,” Lincke explains. “Someone had used an excavation pit to dump industrial waste contaminated with pigments over there. All that was excavated, the hole was filled in again, and that was it.”

Lincke’s architecture firm began by converting the site’s factory hall with adjacent workshops into an artist’s studio and offices. Next came the garden, and finally, as the newly built pièce de résistance, the striking residence – a raised concrete and glass pavilion that looks like it has lifted straight out of the ground on its six supporting pillars and central entrance plinth. Not forgetting the latest addition on the riverbank, devoted to the couple’s kids, Otto and Louisa, and their posse – a miniature sandy beach.

© Image Noshe

And now the tour begins: First stop, Reyle’s studio. Entering the hall with its high, mullioned factory windows feels like walking into a building supplies store for steampunks. Under the old gantry crane, once used to suspend ships’ engines for repair, Reyle’s assistants work at the cutting bench and hang viewing samples of new works. Stern-looking welding equipment waits in front of zinc shelving units that reach almost to the ceiling, containing meticulously arranged pots of paint, huge rolls of plastic foil, stacks of acrylic panes, and Mylar. Whether shiny (copper, silver, and steel), shimmering, iridescent, reflective, or hologram-surfaced, whether printed with maple or zebrawood grain, if you can’t find the DIY material of your worst nightmare here, you’ll never find it.

© Images Noshe

To really understand Reyle’s art, you need to see him at work in these surroundings, as his chilled Swabian demeanor suddenly switches to absolute focus, like when he bends over a patchwork surface prepared by an assistant: Have we got the right folds in this piece of black, shiny foil reminiscent of crude oil? Where in the image’s composition are the jarring colors and textures too obviously kitschy? And where does it have just the right degree of banality, suspended precisely between horror and attraction? This is how, in a painstaking process of weighing up, dismissing, and starting over – which can take months – Reyle creates what the eminent New York Times art critic Roberta Smith described in her review of Reyle’s first show in the United States in 2004 as a “meditation on the ways, means and inevitability of pictorial illusion.” And as “surprisingly beautiful.”

© Image Noshe

An entirely different atmosphere prevails in the adjacent wing housing offices for the couple and their administrative staff. Here, attention is focused on computer screens; thanks to underfloor heating and large French windows with views to the outside, it feels like visiting a chalet for workaholics. For all this hi-tech domesticity, Lincke preserved elements of the architecture’s robust past – here a section of raw brick wall, there a grille-covered lamp, or, as in her own studio, a stenciled sign on the wall declaring “Smoking forbidden, by police order” in red 1950s lettering (the young architects planning minimal holiday houses for a lakeside site in Berlin’s greenbelt don’t look like they need to be told).

The current premier project of Tanja Lincke Architekten is the conversion of the Berlin headquarters of Rheinstahl (built in 1922) into a privately funded exhibition venue for contemporary art. The collectors Sigrid and Ekkehard Streletzki aim to create a dynamic art space for themselves and Berlin next to the Neukölln ship canal. On three generously dimensioned levels, temporary exhibitions will take place, for which Lincke has created an enfilade of rooms, “basically like the Palazzo Ducale in Mantua.” From the outset, conditions could not be better, she says: “The building has excellent proportions. It was designed ten years later by Emil Fahrenkamp, who was responsible for the famous Shell House, a modernist landmark on the Landwehrkanal.”

© Noshe

There is a light rain as we walk along the river toward the couple’s home, ideal weather for the “ruin garden” that separates the private part of the site from the working area. It is focused in the hall-sized rectangle of the shipyard’s former slipway, of which only the roofless walls remain, including a huge doorway facing the river, a rusting stairway that reaches into the void, and a white-tiled wall of a washroom that now has the air of an outdoor installation. The massive concrete ramp is also still there, complete with embedded rails with which patrol boats were once hauled out of the water and launched again. Around this industrial folly, there are lush patches of turf, clouds of ornamental grasses, and creepers that are starting to climb the walls. All in what Lincke calls a “balance of laisser-aller and curating.”

The architect, born in the Thuringian town of Bad Liebenstein and trained in Aachen, and the artist, born in Tübingen in 1970, designed the ensemble together, right down to the stacks of huge chunks of the site’s original concrete slab, whose similarity to the ice floe in Caspar David Friedrich’s famous painting is surely no coincidence. With its romantic ruin aesthetic, the interplay of yesterday and today, architecture and nature, feels like a riff on the location, a playful Gesamtkunstwerk whose title could be “Why two creative Gen-X Germans would rather live in Berlin than in clean and tidy cities like Stuttgart or Munich.”

© Image Noshe

“I was already partying on industrial sites as a teenage punk,” Reyle says. “And when I came to Berlin in the 90s there were great spaces here that hadn’t been totally renovated, yet to be claimed by investors. That’s exactly what Tanja and I were celebrating when we preserved the roofless shipyard hall as a ruin.” Of course, they are both aware of how their strategy flirts with sentimentality and kitsch. “My fear of this sort of transgression is rather low,” says Reyle, sharing a complicit smile with his wife. “After all, that’s what my day job is all about.”

Moreover, the new living quarters that stand alongside this structure offer the perfect antidote to gimmickry in both structural and visual terms. Eight-meter-long reinforced steel piles were driven into the riverbank because “the groundwater is just ninety centimeters under the surface here,” Lincke says while unlocking the heavy main door. With its lightweight concrete facade and its olive-brown anodized aluminum window frames, the house applies a time-tested Mafia tactic – hiding in plain sight. “Seen from the water, you might take it for a control tower used by the neighboring water police,” says Lincke. Only after having taken a long look at the house or experiencing it from the inside does one realize that its “no more, no less” elegance recalls Mies van der Rohe’s Farnsworth House (the same strict rhythm of vertical elements, the same central utility block).

© Noshe

“For me it was important that all of the materials remain authentic and that nothing should be distorted by paint or paneling,” Lincke explains as we sit down at the large dining table. She wanted the residence to feel clear and light, “like a bare shell with the windows already fitted. We constructed all the sealing and insulation in such a way that it goes unnoticed.” The price of such an approach: “Meticulous planning, lots of work on details. Plus, non-standard solutions here and there.”

Indeed, she and Reyle left nothing to chance. Before they made the final decision to build the house, the location was tested in real life with a tent borrowed from the Order of Malta aid organization, in which they lived for several weeks during the summer: “We experienced what it’s like to wake up in the morning with the sunlight from the river reflecting on the inside of the tent – it was wonderful.” The dimensions of the large freestanding partition in the living space were also tried out, varied, and discussed using a full-scale model made of roofing laths and cardboard. Watching over the planning process like some benevolent spirit was the Berlin-based architect Arno Brandlhuber, known for his “anti-villa” and a good friend of the couple. “We often discussed the house with Arno,” Reyle says, “and he constantly supplied us with food for thought.”

© Image Noshe

And what was Reyle’s own contribution to their future home? “I was responsible for the lapses of taste,” he says, keeping a straight face. Like the chairs we’re sitting on – black-painted, Louis-something, upholstered in garish neon camouflage canvas. This pattern, whose colors make an absurdity of its supposed function, was designed by Reyle for Dior in 2011 for a limited edition of bags and ballerina shoes. The chairs were made for a vernissage dinner at Art Basel Miami.

© Image Noshe

“For me, there’s nothing worse than a Knoll sofa upholstered in gray wool, that kind of aspirational zero-risk furniture,” he says. Much more up his alley was a sofa unit from the 1960s with pull-out elements that he found on eBay while building work was going on. At the time, its huge and rather (ahem) unconventional form was covered with black-and-white synthetic leather. Lincke had her doubts, so the monstrous sofa was set up in the unfinished space on a trial basis. This prompted Otto and Louisa, still cuddly infants back then, to immediately start clambering on it with shrieks of enthusiasm (a moment captured on camera) – end of test phase.

The sofa is now covered with an expensive mohair fabric in a color combination for which Kvadrat probably receives few orders: “extra-stuffy mustard yellow and lilac-tinged pink,” confirms Reyle. With neon yellow piping. What in the world does that look like? Surprisingly beautiful.