Interview

The concrete hut in the Erzgebirge mountains– what’s the story behind that?

Sven Fröhlich
The region has a lot to do with our sporting roots: downhill skiing. Cross-country skiing, so as such it also has something to do with memories.

Memories. memories.

Sven Fröhlich
It has to be said: we are nostalgic. The sort of people that can explain how the engine in an old car works...

Getting back to the concrete hut:

Sven Fröhlich
Just by chance we came across this particular piece of real estate on an auction platform. We thought that this was a place where you can do some experimenting – without knowing precisely what. Then it took two years.

Martin Fröhlich
Whenever you go on vacation as an architect, you always get annoyed having to sit in ugly surroundings, on plastic chairs. When otherwise you spend all day driving that sort of thing out of people! We do things better. The hut is out in the open, 10 meters in front of the welcome to the place sign. The building regulations were such that you couldn’t just tear something down and put something else in its place. That is how we hit on the idea of covering it in concrete. We were only able to extend it by 10 percent. That’s a rule of thumb where building in the open are concerned.

So do you then your cards on the building authorities’ table and say, OK, we’ve bought this hut and want to cover it in concrete?

Martin Fröhlich
Nooo, the building application plans are on a scale of 1:100 and there’s a rough description. You don’t go into any great detail.

So what is now the inside wall is the old outer sheath?

Martin Fröhlich
Right.

There’s no heating?

Sven Fröhlich
We discussed it beforehand with a friend who’s a building physician. On average we spend 20 days a year in the hut, so insulating it was not economical. This friend suggested doing it differently, installing something that gives off a lot of radiant heat. That’s how any mountain hut that is stonewalled works: You keep warm next to the stove and the next day you’re gone again!

And are you making a romantic anti-heat insulation, anti-thermal skin statement at the same time?

Sven Fröhlich
We were after a primeval hut, right.

Martin Fröhlich
Yes, we’re against this Germany-insulating-itself-to-death approach. Is it not a political statement if we ask how much heat we actually really need? Basically, though, we do that with any project.

But do the concrete walls reflect cold air?

Martin Fröhlich
That’s the case in any mountain hut.

A wooden structure would be easier to heat. I’m talking here about the famous ‘hut climate’.

Martin Fröhlich
Yes, but not high up in the mountains. At high altitude you get stone huts. But you’re right: Wood, stacked, would have had advantages. But the existing structure was made of wood, and we wanted to play around with contrast and moulds.

How do you integrate this experience in normal projects?

Martin Fröhlich
Whenever the developer of a single family residence came along, he wanted 250 square meters of living space. And in most cases what he got from AFF was a 150-square meter house. We always got them to step down a notch, and asked what was really necessary. A lot of houses ended up being much smaller. Discussing with planners about whether the rooms have to be heated throughout was actually more difficult. Farmhouses never worked like that, in winter it was only warm in the main room.

Sven Fröhlich
We have always told developers: Spend 30,000 rather than just 10,000 on your windows. Because they’ll never need replacing. And put cement screed down. Then, when you come into an inheritance or get a pay rise you can put a wooden floor in, or buy a Persian carpet.

Martin Fröhlich
There’s actually nothing worse than going round to families who are slaves of their own homes!

This school that was recently featured in ‘Bauwelt’ (the 3. 2011 edition): What’s the showstopper with regard to the facade?

Martin Fröhlich
It’s a composite thermal insulation facade. Highly insulated such that it even goes further than current heat insulation stipulations. Making walls of lime sand brick and putting first the insulation, then the plaster on top gives you the cheapest building part you can get these days. Industrialization extends to the building trade as well! The question for us was how we could move on from here? What can we do with the surface, perhaps using sgraffitto technology. We have to find a low-cost but high quality finish. We had a ready-made, in the form of the curtains hanging in the school...

... these camouflage nets, Swedish camouflage nets.

Martin Fröhlich
Tear-proof paper, costs next to nothing. We take them, hang them in front, give them good spraying, job done. Like a street graffiti artist. So we use a left-over ready-made to create structure. Ultimately what we had was not just the curtains but rather a stencil, a prototype, because it’s technically fine.

So what is like being a young studio in Berlin in the post-Stimmann era?

Martin Fröhlich
We didn’t actually work much in the Stimmann era, we had no projects. But I can well imagine that everything is opening up more, that there is a softer view of things. But it’s budgetary planning that still imposes the actual restrictions.

Thriftiness can also be a virtue, though.

Martin Fröhlich
What chance do utopias have under these circumstances?

Do utopias cost money?

Martin Fröhlich
By utopia I don’t mean throwing money at things. No, you have to think differently with utopias. You perhaps violate the brief. Make houses in which there is only warm room, where everybody congregates when it gets cold. Build open museums in which you also stroll around wearing an overcoat. Or take as an example the reconstruction of Dresden Castle. In Dresden they’ve been reconstructing the castle for 20 years. That is almost a utopia. Economically it doesn’t pay.

But if anything money is spent on old structures.

Martin Fröhlich
There are few examples of it being spent on new things. The opera house in Hamburg. Only rarely does a small community treat itself to something big. For Freiberg the castle was indeed was something unusually big.

How did the Freiberg project come about?

Sven Fröhlich
The town was the developer, and for the most part received subsidies. The users were the Ministry of the Interior of the Federal State of Saxony for the state archive, and the Mountain Academy of the Technical University for its mineralogical collection, not to mention the town of Freiberg, which used the castle itself, while gastronomy was the fourth in the group. That took some doing.

Martin Fröhlich
Projects of this nature only come about through committed people with a vision. Take, for example, the Rector of the Mountain Academy of the Technical University, who is now the Minister of Finance in Saxony. It was he who had a vision of housing the collection there. As far as the state archive was concerned, the procedure for awarding public contracts for freelance professional services was already in place, with selected architects, whose brief was to build an archive out in the country. Nonetheless there was a vision: The castle is empty, why not use it for the archive and the collection! If you take a look at the history of our architecture, it’s a bit like what happened in Styria, in Austria. Why did we do such good things there for a while? There were good architects there, good politicians, good decision-makers, who perhaps knew each other from school, that’s how good things come about.

And how does something visionary come about in Berlin?

Martin Fröhlich
Well, Berlin is a conglomerate of lots of people who have moved here and few Berliners. They will meet each other gradually. That’ll be the big surprise. Wait and see.

I wish you all the best and thank you for the conversation.

 Projects

Oliver Elser is a curator at Deutsches Architekturmuseum. He has written numerous architectural reviews in newspapers and magazines (Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Süddeutsche Zeitung, Texte zur Kunst, Frankfurter Rundschau, AD - Architectural Digest, Bauwelt, Baumeister etc.) as well as in catalogues and books. He has taught in Graz and Vienna. He lives with his wife and two children in Frankfurt/Main.

project management: Andrea Nakath