14 September 2022

The unique testimonies of modernist buildings:
Brenne Architekten’s archive of material samples to go to the Akademie der Künste archives

Brenne Architekten’s archive of material samples is being transferred to the Akademie der Künste. The archive contains around 12,000 items of material testimony from modernist buildings and UNESCO World Heritage Sites in Berlin, Weimar, Dessau and Bernau. It is a collection consisting of fragments of plaster, building components and paint applied to wood, plaster and metal. The material samples are a key resource for historical building research and monument preservation and for topics connected with restoration and art technology. They supplement the written estates relating to modernist architecture and the work of Max and Bruno Taut, Hans Scharoun, Hugo Häring, Werner Düttmann and others already kept in the Architectural Archives at the Akademie der Künste.

The primary documents were compiled by the architectural firm Brenne Architekten (formerly Architekturwerkstatt Pitz-Brenne) between 1979 and 2004. The samples come from such places as the Zehlendorf housing estate Onkel Toms Hütte, the Falkenberg garden city and the large Siemensstadt estate, as well as from the Akademie building at Hanseatenweg. Over the last two years the collection has been inventoried and archived by professional restorer Jana Hainbach as part of the Wüstenrot Foundation Fellowship “Inventarisierung des Materialarchivs Brenne – Bauten der Siedlungen der Berliner Moderne” (Inventorying the Brenne Material Archive – Buildings from the “Berlin Modernism Housing Estates”). Professors Thomas Danzl and Christoph Herm have acted as technical consultants, with the support of Brenne Architekten. Based on the work carried out by Brenne Architekten in the 1980s and 1990s when the samples were systematically secured and preserved, the relics have now been logged, photographed for documentation purposes, packaged in line with expert conservation guidelines and correlated with historical research reports. This inventory work not only allows the material samples to be protected over the long term but also provides a data basis facilitating research into the collection’s holdings.
The valuable collection will be accessible to the public via the archive’s database as of spring 2023 – a handsome gift for Winfried Brenne, who celebrates his 80th birthday today.

Winfried Brenne, born 14 September 1942 in Plauen, lives in Berlin. He studied architecture in Wuppertal and at Technische Universität Berlin and founded the architecture practice Winfried Brenne Architekten in 1990, having run the architecture workshop Architekturwerkstatt Pitz-Brenne together with Helge Pitz since 1977. In 2002, he teamed up with Franz Jaschke to launch Brenne Architekten GmbH; Fabian Brenne has been a partner since 2018. The office focuses on the preservation, restoration, maintenance and recognition of modernist architectural monuments. Winfried Brenne has been a member of the Akademie der Künste since 2006.

The Architectural Archives at the Akademie der Künste currently comprise 79 archives and 92 collections, representing material on some 250 years of architectural history. Besides the comprehensive archive of the work of Hans Scharoun, they also include the estates and pre-mortem bequests of Hugo Häring, Bruno and Max Taut, Adolf Behne, Julius Posener, Werner Düttmann, Ludwig Leo, Gustav Peichl, Donata and Christoph Valentien, Karla Kowalski and Michael Szyszkowitz.

Enquiries / Further information:
Dr. Sibylle Hoiman, Head of the Architectural Archives
Tel. +49 (0)30 200 57–1625, hoiman@adk.de