I got 99 problems and a Professor is one

One fine Wednesday evening, panic erupted throughout the Internet and messages were flying between confused students. The Bachelor students, note; not the Master students or both of the classes, but only the 20 or so Bachelor students of our studio, received an email from our Professor stating that he was leaving the studio and the University with immediate effect. He was not coming back. And he was not saying his adieus to us. 

Without an explanation, without any respect for us as students, without any knowing of what would happen next, we were stranded without a Professor - in the middle of the damn term. So we waited a day. Nothing. No news from the University. No news from our teachers. Did we still have a class to go to? A studio to attend? Would we get our credits? Would we graduate? Nothing. 

Not only did students choose the studio because of its Professor (a professor that just gets up and leaves!!) but "miscalculations" on the numbers of attending students in the beginning of the year resulted in three studios being cut out of the schedule - leaving students only to choose between mere four studios, causing well over packed studios. 

Finally we got some clues of what was going to happen. We would continue. Just carry on as before, with our teachers there to lead us - see us through the term. And after that, there will be no more Studio Sauerbruch at the Udk Berlin. 

as the wall came tumbling down we went looking for some freedom

On the night of 9 November, we celebrated the reunion of Berlin. The 25 years that had passed since the fall of the Berlin Wall. All morning I could feel the excitement in the air, the joy, the historic wings of time and place that were fluttering over the city and the sad memories of what people had to go through and the marks that are still there. To the strains of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony in the presence of guests of honour and eyewitnesses, white balloons would be released into the skies to commemorate the peaceful revolution of 1989 and the fall of the Wall. 

So we headed down to Brandenburg Tor to be a part of a unified Berlin but were greeted by police and fencing saying that we could not pass - it was closed. And so we stood there, with thousand of others, our faces glued to the fences trying to see a glimpse of the grand celebrations that were taking place on the other side of Brandenburg Tor, on the right side - in the West. 

We asked the police and guards what to do, how we could get through, upon they all answered "It is closed, you can´t get in… but try to see if there is an opening somewhere, a hole…" "Is this meant to be symbolic?" we replied. But we found a hole. And in the dark we pushed ourselves forward through thickets and bushes in the company of a dozen others to get to the music, the dancing, the currywurst and the glühwein. And then, then it was really good. 

when in Weimar

A couple of weeks ago I made a trip down to Weimar with the International Office Coordinators and international students. Weimar - the place of Goethe, Schiller, Franz Liszt, Wassily Kandinsky, Walter Gropius, National Socialist propaganda and of course the Bauhaus - the most important art school in Germany at the time, founded with the idea of creating a "total" work of art in which all arts, including architecture, would eventually be brought together. A style that became one of the most influential currents in modern design and Modernist architecture, as well as the art, design and architectural education. First founded in Weimar, it was later relocated to Dessau and we made a stop there to indulge in the overload of great architecture. Not only did we walk around the hallways of the Bauhaus School, eat in the canteen, entered the office of Mr Gropius and hanged out in the students private rooms, we also got introduced to the Masters' Houses - imagine; every teacher got assigned their own house, all in a true Bauhaus style, except for the interior of house Kandinsky where actual golden walls were put up as a backdrop to old style furnitures and big carpets. My kind of house.

After the Dessau stop, we got back on the route to Weimar were we continued in the footsteps of the Bauhaus movement but added a little history of Goethe, Schiller and the Nazis to the to-do-list.

Weimar is a pretty dull place after dark. A beautiful, but dull place. We saw the theatre glowing in sparkling lights buzzing with life and movement, but as the doors opened and people started to spill out on to the little town square, in a second they were all dissolved and on their way home leaving the little town dark and quite behind. Through some inside information we found one local pub that was filled with action, after we had filled our stomachs with crêpes at the local créperie - no sturdy german food for this group of students. 

The last evening in Weimar, I ended up in a true local bar where a jug of beer was handed to me at the measly cost of 1 euro. There the bar lady acted as a shepherd gathering her herd close to her, providing them with beer, good laughs and a lot of gossip. 

Mechanically opened windows.

Luckily we got a guided tour of the newly opened New Masterhouse Gropius, done by BFM Architekten, where the Kurt-Weill-Centre will house from now on. The Masterhouse was destroyed during the WWII and now rebuilt in a most sensible way. Totally in awe of the place. 

On a more tragic note. Buchenwald Concentration Camp is situated just in the outskirts of Weimar. A strategically well-thought-through position - the first concentration camp during the WWII that was actually applied for. So we got on a bus and drove the 7km to the place where 250 000 people were kept prisoners, without the knowing of the inhabitants of Weimar - or so they claimed. It was my first visit to a concentration camp. Enough said. 

A steel slab on the grounds of Buchenwald engraved with the names of fifty-one national groups that were victimized there. The slab is set at a constant 37 degrees Celsius, to suggest the body heat of those whose memory it would enshrine. In winter, with snow covering the rest of the ground, the slab is always clear, an all-season marker for the site of the original attempt to commemorate the crimes of Buchenwald. 

what you doin' in the club on a Thursday?

Fun facts I've picked up during my first weeks at UdK:

1. People smoke in school. Inside the actual school. Granted, not in the studio, but in the hall ways, on the staircases - thick deep smoke from roll-your-own cigarettes. 

2. Germans drink juices and sodas all the time. Not water, but juices. When they are thirsty they buy a glass bottle of juice. When we have a five minute break, they buy a glass bottle of juice. And then they sip that through out the whole day, until they buy another one. 

3. On our ground floor the toilets are lit with UV lights. The headache when you really need to relieve yourself and enter a dark, small cubicle with only the glowing toilet paper as a guide on your way. 

4. Our crouqis model not only has a huge vagina tattooed on her upper back - I mean huge, with specific detailing - she was also wearing a tampon during last session. My first impulse was to stand up, slow clap and end with raising my hands in a foam-finger-matter yelling You go girl! But I didn´t. 

I just kept thinking how she was coping - how did she feel lying there all naked with that deep dull aching, spasmodic pain, the irradiant feeling down your back and upper thighs… aaaah, I really hate having my period.