HANS SCHAROUN
Christmas Cards (1940 - 1947)

Hans Scharoun's hitherto little-known caricatures are once again on public display after Scharaun's opening exhibition in December 2007 to mark the 5th anniversary. The original drawings packaged as Christmas or greeting cards were mostly addressed to family members and friends. In the exhibition, the extraordinary correspondence with his long-time assistant and collaborator Chen Kuen Lee (which extended into the late 1960s), the special continuity of this friendship/working relationship between Scharoun and Lee becomes comprehensible. With their humorous poems, many of the surviving sheets were aimed directly at the turmoil of the years of the second world war - making it clear how these times could also be countered artistically.

During this time, Hans Scharoun lived with his wife Aenne in an apartment in the residential complex at Jungfernheideweg 4, which he designed and completed in 1930. Because the commissions for Scharoun's architectural practice were scarce during wartime - he was still able to realize two single-family houses and carry out various additions and conversions - he participated in the Chinese Werkbund, which was founded by Hugo Häring and Chen Kuen Lee in 1941 and whose working group dissolved in 1943. During this period he also produced hundreds of sheets of utopian architectural drawings, in which Scharoun liberated himself from the constraints of the regime by inventing an architecture for the future.

About Chen Kuen Lee (*1915 in Wuxing, China, † 2003 in Berlin)
The Chinese architect Chen Kuen Lee came from Shanghai to Berlin in 1930 at the age of 16. After an internship as a bricklayer in Berlin, he studied architecture in Braunschweig and graduated from the Technische Hochschule Berlin in 1937. Lee was employed from 1937 to 1943 as a personal assistant in the architectural office of Hans Scharoun whose office at the time was located in his apartment in the Siemensstadt housing estate at Jungfernheideweg 4.

Susanne Bürner A House of One’s Own — Me and My Neighbours
HD-Video, 28:00 min., 2013

The house (ul. Katowicka 9, Warszawa)
The house resembles Le Corbusier's and Pierre Jeanneret's duplex in the Weißenhofsiedlung Stuttgart of 1927, which Josef Szanajca had visited shortly after it was built, and also follows Le Corbusier's 5 points to a new architecture. The house is divided into three segments. It is located in the Saska Kępa district, on the eastern side of the Vistula River, which was first settled by Warsaw's artists and intellectuals in the late 1920s. Young architects designed avant-garde villas for them. Due to its location, the neighborhood remained largely unscathed during World War II and is now one of Warsaw's oldest developments. The house was completed in 1929 by Bohdan Lachert, who lived in it until his death, and Josef Szanajca. The part of the house where the film takes place houses the Dutch Society, the other two segments are private apartments.

The architects: Bohdan Lachert (1900-1987) and Josef Szanajca (1902-1939).
Lachert and Szanajca met while studying architecture at the Warsaw University of Technology. After graduating in 1926, they worked together over a period of seventeen years, until Szanajca's untimely death, on nearly one hundred and fifty projects, forty of which were completed. Together with architects Helena and Szymon Syrkus, Barbara and Stanisław Brukalscy, artists Władysław Strzemiński, Katarzyna Kobro, and others, both were co-founders of the avant-garde group Praesens (1926-1929), which published two issues of the magazine of the same name. The group's aspiration was to shape society through the conscious creation of architectural forms.

The Systemic Constellation
The technique of Systemic Constellation, also called Family Constellation or Psychodrama, was developed by various psychotherapists, most significantly by Bert Hellinger. The family constellation is based on the assumption that inner-fundamental relationships also have an inner-spatial effect. In a constellation, a group of people in a room represents the interpersonal conflict of another person looking at their own situation from the outside. Dynamics develop between the various people representing the system, which is meant to give the person watching a new perspective on their own conflict. In „A House of One's Own - Me and My Neighbours“ the professionally guided constellation serves to show the dynamics between the house at 9 Katowicka Street and some of the neighbouring houses.