From high-end to no-budget: the Haus des Lehrers

Verena Gerlach

The Haus des Lehrers (HdL; ‘House of the Teacher’), one of Berlin’s first high rise structures, is a 56m high towerblock with an unmistakeable mosaic frieze wrapped around it. This frieze, named the belly bandage by Berliners, depicts ‘the socialist life’ and was designed by German Democratic Republic artist Walter Womaka.

The building’s twelve-storey-high façade stands at one end of the Alexanderplatz facing the city centre, providing its inhabitants with a great view across the area with its well-known television tower. Built between 1961 and 1964 as a public project, the HdL was designed by the architect Hermann Henselmann as a venue where socialist teachers could be educated and trained. It is linked to the Congress Hall, a building that looks on the inside like a set from a 1960s sci-fi TV series.

Before 1989, the HdL hosted 5 restaurants, a discotheque, a cinema and theatre and an exclusive bar on the top floor, to accommodate everybody’s tastes. But only the teachers, as an important part of the socialist system, were allowed to enjoy these facilities. This was a rather perverse situation, because most of the public could only see this glamour and not participate in it. For this reason, the HdL was not very popular amongst East Berliners.

The location of the building is an important reason for what took place inside and outside it after the fall of the GDR: from inside, there is this fantastic view and a feeling of being truly part of the city. It is easy to turn the place into a public advertisement, as everybody in the city sees it constantly. When you see this façade as a graphic designer, you immediately want to play scrabble on it.

This is an example for one of the first typographic works on the façade: ‘Hoffnungsvolle Zukunft’ (hopeful future) from 1968.

When the German Democratic Republic collapsed in 1989, the HdL was an important witness to the incidents in the former GDR capital. During the last big demonstration on 4 November 1989 (which might be seen as the real date of the ‘Wende’ – the end of the 1945 division of Germany), what the demonstrators didn’t know was that the HdL was full of military and there were sharpshooters on top of the buildings of the Alexanderplatz. The final demonstration was held just in front of the HdL. Lots of people from West Berlin also joined the march to support the East Berliners. Luckily, the situation didn’t turn into a second Beijing.

After reunification, the building – still owned by the city – was used for several departments of the city council. But after standing vacant for over a year, the district authority decided to allow its temporary use by private individuals and started to rent out on the base of limited leases in August 1999. Happily, the landlord preferred young creative tenants, a policy which made an exciting mixture for everybody there.

In 1999, a huge poster (set in Meta Condensed) hung from the façade, showing the words ‘Wir sind das Volk’ (we are the people), which was the official party slogan from 10 years before. This was when I visited the HdL for the first time and immediately decided to stay. The whole building was in quite a bad condition and there was still this awful smell of the GDR disinfectant in all of the rooms. So why did I want to move in and run a studio in such a place?

The main reasons of course were the amazing view and the location in the heart of Berlin. The cheap rent and overstated room decor made the decision easy. In fact, the first tenants used the eighth floor as a squash court and the seventh floor was the ‘living room’ by day and the party and concert floor at night.

After only a few months, the HdL community had grown to 32 tenants, which made a total of 80 people. The inner circle, the so-called ‘studio community’ counted about 40 members. It was a group of architects, film makers, designers, photographers, musicians – and some people who nobody really knew what they were doing. The whole place began to be an important part of the Berlin subculture.

The people helped each other out with equipment, expertise and ideas, sorted out computer problems, borrowed books, provided jobs among each other and built up friendships. It was the perfect place for all kinds of synergetic effects, even political ones. For example in November 2000, when there was a debate over the German term ‘Leitkultur’ (leading culture) going on in the press. This was a term introduced by the conservative politician Friedrich Merz, which led to a huge discussion across the whole country. It meant that Mr Merz wanted immigrants to accept the Germans as their leading culture and to assimilate completely into German society. At the same time, the Government allowed a public march by the NPD, a Neo-Nazi party, across the Alexanderplatz and in front of the HdL. Something had to be done!

In a brainstorming, ‘countercultural’ night, a muscian, a photographer and myself decided to use the well proved guerrilla technique of banner making to show our opinion to the public. When the next day, the Nazis marched past the building, a 25m long banner was hanging from the façade, labelling the ‘leading culture’ for the German public. The façade began to be a blackboard for the opinion of the people who worked inside to be written on.

From Autumn 2000 on, the studio community were inside the HdL almost 24 hours a day. They started a campaign against the demolition of other GDR buildings of the sixties that had just started. They organised all kinds of cultural events to get as many visitors as possible into the building. And of course they wanted to stay in their studios, despite the fact that the contracts were just for a limited period.

Parts of the façade were used for neon tube light installations to project messages like the mirrored ‘Denkmal’ (monument) and ‘NOT FOR SALE’ into the city.

On Friday 13 October 2000, the community arranged an open day. It went on for 24 hours and was a huge success for the group. From then on, the community labelled itself as ‘HdL-network’. Therefore they needed a corporate image. Because the community was very much defined by the Haus, the first idea was to find a ‘Haus typeface’ (corporate font). I designed the HdL typeface Tephe, which everybody could use for communal activities.

Tephe

In the foyer, attached to the wall beside the doorman’s office, was a huge board displaying the list of tenants. These boards are called ‘mute porters’. Later, after the first reconstruction of the HdL in the seventies, the metal board was replaced by a new one made of wood. Movable white plastic letters were fixed to the board. These letters were great to play around with and make anagrams as soon as the doorman turned his back.

These letters became the template for the community’s font. The thick line on the bottom of each letter keeps them fixed behind a thin wooden bar on the board. It’s an important part of the font’s appearance. But there is also a variant without the line, which is how the letters appear when fixed on the board. I also added missing characters and diacritics.

Beside the corporate font, a logo was needed. Instead of taking elements from the outside of the HdL – because the community didn’t want to hide behind an existing design like Womaka’s frieze – I chose a typical perforated ceiling panel, which was the only architectural element common to everyone’s studio. As a logo, the panel would keep the group’s activities free of historical overtones.

While my studio was located in this famous building, I also designed several other typefaces.

Trafo (electric transformer)

Down in the basement of the Congress Hall, I found the basis for the small font family Trafo: the handwritten signage of the supply units of the HdL and the congress hall. Instead of designing completely new shapes out of the unique characteristics of found letters as I normally do, my idea was to adapt single letters to look good in text. So I created the typeface without making too many changes to the original.

The end

The tenancy agreements were limited from the very start. The final deadline for moving out was 30 June 2001. While the HdL network became legendary, most of the members still meet up to share intelligence about Berlin’s subculture and inspire one another; or they still work together.

But some activities in the building went on…

Blinkenlights

Celebrating its 20th anniversary, Germany’s CCC (Chaos Computer Club) made a unique gift to all its members and friends: from September 2001 to February 2002, the hackers turned the façade of the HdL into the world’s biggest computer screen.

The upper eight floors of the building were transformed into a huge display by arranging 144 lamps behind the front windows. Each lamp was connected to the power source via a relay. If the relay switched on, the window pane was illuminated. A computer controlled all the lamps to produce a monochrome matrix of 18 by 8 pixels. The installation ran for 23 weeks and five days in total – day and night.

Blinkenlights was planned and built in only four weeks from the first idea to the display of the first movie.

Three computers shared the job of controlling the system. To create and play their own animations, Blinkenlights fans all over the world could download a special tool called Blinkenpaint. This easy to use animation application enabled them to create their own short films to be shown in Alexanderplatz.

Because Blinkenpaint was based on Adobe Director, it provided several handy features for animation. The movie was saved to disc as a Blinkenlights Movie – the file format that the computers in the HdL needed to play it on the façade. Once saved, the user just had to send his movie to the Chaos Control Center via the internet.

Here, all cables from the lamps came together in a huge thread. Five kilometres of cable was laid out in the building. And of course the hackers were very proud of this quite unconventional display technique.

Pong

An even more interactive part of Blinkenlights was the arcade classic Pong. The players could stand on the Alexanderplatz, watching the HdL, and just call the system with their mobile phones. The building stopped displaying its current program and switched over to the Pong playground: two paddles and a ball. You could play with a friend or against the computer, using the keys of the mobile phone as cursors.

Love letters

A special romantic service was the idea of showing love letters on the façade. First, the movie with the message was created with Blinkenpaint and sent via e-mail to the Chaos Control Center. Then the  sender was given an access code, which he had to use when calling the system by mobile phone. The Textmovie started immediately to impress the loved one.

The very end

On February 23 2002 the miracle was over. The organisers didn’t just shut down the computers: during a great farewell party, Tim Pritlove, the mastermind behind the event, cut through the cables with a circular saw.

The Blinkenlights font

But what remains from this great event? Just the pictures, films and the animated movies?

One little souvenir from it is the Blinkenlights font. It was designed by me in collaboration with Tim Pritlove and represents the digital incarnation of nearly 24 weeks of fun and amazement.

The work on this font was completely different to the conventional design of a typeface. First, the font was designed by everybody except the type designer. I redrew the individual letters of the love letter movies to form a complete Adobe standard character set in Blinkenpaint. Than I saved every single frame (character) of the movie named with the correct unicode, to keep the glyphs in the correct position. Later, genuis Tim took the movie scripts and converted them – via an Illustrator template representing the matrix formed by the HdL’s façade – into a PostScript font. I just had to open this file in Fontographer, adjust the em-square and sidebearings, add some kerning and generate the font. Then it was ready to be given back as shareware to all the designers of the Blinkenlights animations.

No war

In 2003, after parts of the HdL community had moved their studios into the former headquarters of the GDR’s daily newspaper ‘Neues Deutschland’ (New Germany), two members of the group (Oliver Krieger and myself) used their knowledge of illuminated façades to create a light installation against the war in Iraq. This project was entirely on a no-budget basis, and everybody in the building was happy to help out by providing access to their light switches.

You can download an MP4 movie of the ‘No War’ light switch demonstration here ND_NoWar.mp4 (1.9MB file)

You can find more examples of Verena’s typefaces on her web site www.fraugerlach.de