Dmitry Sukhin, a Russian-born architect with the firm of Erick van Egeraat is battling to save Siedlung Kamswykus, the earliest work of German Modernist architect Hans Scharoun, an early 1920s housing block located in the former East Prussian city of Insterburg, now known as Chernyakhovsk in the Russian enclave of Kaliningrad.
Scharoun (1893-1972) is most famous for his Berlin Philharmonic Hall (1963), but his organic, functional approach to housing design is a major part of his heritage. He was part of Bruno Taut’s group of expressionist architects, the Glass Chain, formed in 1919, and later of Der Ring, which included Walter Gropius.
Siedlung Kamswykus, also known as the Colour Row Settlement, is unique as well for the red, yellow and blue colour block concept that set it apart when the complex was first built. The remaining buildings on Elevatornaya Street, still used as residential housing, have long lost their colour—they are now crumbling and in faded terracotta tones—but Sukhin has prepared renderings of their potential restoration.
Europa Nostra, the pan-European network of heritage organisations, included the Colour Row Settlement in its 2014 list of seven most endangered sites in Europe. Europa Nostra notes that “it is an immediate forerunner of other pioneering social housing projects in Germany, such as the Siemensstadt in Berlin [classified by Unesco in 2008], in which Scharoun was also involved.”
Sukhin, in a 2014 interview with Archi.ru, a Russian architectural website, compared it to another German landmark.
“The Colour Row Settlement is not only Scharoun’s earliest surviving work, but his only [existing] coloured building, and second in the overall list of ‘coloured construction’, he said. “The first, Traut’s Gartenstadt Falkenberg in Berlin, is on Unesco’s World Heritage List.”
Scharoun worked in Insterburg during the massive 1915-1922 German reconstruction of East Prussia, during and after the First World War. He was also a watercolourist and organised art exhibitions in East Prussia.
Sukhin says that although the Colour Row Settlement was not formally part of the reconstruction project since it was a new complex on the edge of town, built as residences for shopkeepers, clerks and handymen, “we simply have not other such ensembles from the revival period”.
“This is local treasure No. 1,” he told The Art Newspaper. Insterburg, founded in the 14th century by the Teutonic Knights, was transferred to the Soviet Union along with northern East Prussia following the defeat of the Nazis, which was renamed the Kaliningrad Oblast. The remaining German population was expelled and the region cut off to foreigners.
“When I did all my initial research on Scharoun in the 1970s the work in Insterburg was inaccessible and I knew of it only from drawings and photos in the Akademie der Künste [Berlin],” said Peter Blundell Jones, a professor of architecture at the University of Sheffield and author of a 1978 monograph about Scharoun, in an email to The Art Newspaper. East Prussia, he said, is where “Scharoun learned to build and developed some of his ideas”.
Sukhin, a member of the Scharoun Society in Berlin, is also involved in two organisations, Kamswyker Kreis society and InsterJAHR, which promote the city’s heritage and train young architects to restore it. He told The Art Newspaper that he has encountered bureaucratic and financial obstacles both on the Russian and German side.
Although regional government experts are considering the Coloured Row Settlement for inclusion in the regional heritage list, Chernyakhovsk’s city budget, said Sukhin, is “close to absolutely zero”, and it is unable to help with preservation.
“‘If it’s valuable to the Germans, let the Germans deal with it,’” is a point of view that is being spread, he said, by preservationists who would prefer that attention be devoted to restoring the ruins of Insterburg Castle, which was given by the state to the Russian Orthodox Church following passage of a controversial 2010 law that also transferred historically German churches to the Russian church.
Of German support, he says: “The German authorities are ignoring us. I have not once been able to convince the German consul from Kaliningrad to visit Chernyakhovsk.”
Sukhin also says that while it is conceivable to find major outside funding for the project, he regards it as a matter of principle to train restorers and develop local workshops.
He is planning to take an exhibition about Scharoun and the Colour Row Settlement, which recently ran at Moscow’s State Shchusev Museum of Architecture, on the road to cities around Russia and possibly Israel.
