Past Into Present

Several bunkers in Germany have been transformed over the past few years. Once powerful wartime relics, they’ve become luxury apartments, fancy gallery spaces, or lively cultural centres. Their metre-thick walls could have an intimidating effect, but not for Friederike von Rauch. The Berlin photographer spent four summer days in the telecommunications bunker at Hallesches Ufer in Berlin-Kreuzberg. Dressed in a warm winter jacket and equipped with her medium format camera, she slowly became used to the darkness inside the space. “Every time I went there it was a new experience”, she says. “When I was working I completely forgot that I was in a bunker. The silence is striking.”

After the intervention of British architect John Pawson, this former Nazi fortification is now a private museum housing The Feuerle Collection. In two vast, windowless halls, Khmer sculptures (7th to 13th century) in stone, bronze, and wood are dis- played together with works from contemporary artists Anish Kapoor, Adam Fuss, Nobuyoshi Araki, and others, and Chinese furniture from the Han Dynasty (200 BC to the 18th century). “To me, all these pieces of furniture are sculptures”, says Désiré Feuerle, the German collector and connoisseur of Asian art. For several years he has been looking for a space for the exceptional collection that juxtaposes antiques with contemporary artworks – be it in Germany or somewhere else. The decayed bunker in Berlin was perfect for the purpose, with its arcane spaces that completely concentrate on themselves and tune out any urban context. But the intervention to change the bunker into a museum space was a challenging task: “It is difficult to think of places more charged with atmosphere than these monumental concrete structures. They fall very much into the category of engineered architecture, of the sort that so appealed to Donald Judd”, remarks John Pawson. Instead of focusing on pristine surfaces, the architect considered a series of subtle interventions that remain almost invisible but intensify the quality of the spaces.