The HausBauMaschine (House building machine), featured in 1943 by Ernst Neufert - who was Albert Speer’s main deputy at the German Ministry of Armament - hoped to fulfil the dream of the ultimate mobile factory. It was planed as a giant machine designed to construct automatically full houses. Running on a continuous rail track it was meant to extrude all over occupied Europe a continuous ribbon of multi-story housing. But Speer’s plan never left the drawing board and the machine was left un-built. In this installation we see a current day adaptation of the historic HauseBauMaschine based on the original 1943 blueprints and text. Under the guise of a study on architecture and technology, this work reveals the workings of the German ideological machine. In a humoristic, indirect approach, combining animation and ad-like features, emotionally charged issues are raised such as the regime’s cruelty and on a broader sense, questioning the formation of conceptions of history and the constitutions of power.
The CDA's archives are operating with the support of the Ostrovsky Family Fund and Artis
