26.12.2024

Dream houses on television

Building design

Bayerischer Rundfunk has found them again this time – “dream houses”. Season six begins tomorrow with the most beautiful detached houses in the whole country. The series has a long tradition: Bayerischer Rundfunk regularly goes in search of the most beautiful detached houses in the whole country. The main criteria for the selection are the uniqueness of the design and the passion with which […]

Bayerischer Rundfunk has found them again this time – “dream houses”. Season six begins tomorrow with the most beautiful detached houses in the whole country.

The series has a long tradition: Bayerischer Rundfunk regularly goes in search of the most beautiful detached houses in the whole country. The main criteria for the selection are the uniqueness of the design and the passion with which the builders and architects approached the task. The stories that the films tell are correspondingly diverse: The modern renovation of a historic farmhouse in Lower Bavaria is included, as is a small wooden house on a steep slope in the Allgäu and a city villa with a pool in Munich.

One of the examples(broadcast on March 2) is the new home of a granite factory owner in the Bavarian Forest who wants a wooden house. His wife, however, has her own ideas about the ideal house, and then there is the architect Peter Haimerl. He is finally able to convince them both that it has to be a house made of granite. An adventure, sometimes nerve-wracking, for everyone involved, as the craftsmen are also under great pressure: They have never done anything like this before – “a prefabricated house made of granite. That is unique”. The 24-tonne swimming pool, which was carved out of a huge block of granite, is also characterized by a certain extravagance. For Haimerl, however, it is the logical, modern continuation of the “Grant”, a granite water basin that traditionally stood in front of every Waldler house in the area.
Written and directed by Carina Bauer. Editor: Sabine Reeh

Another story is about a Berlin couple who want to realize their dream of retiring in the Allgäu(broadcast date 16 March). But then adversities arise, such as a steep plot of land, rocky ground and a tight budget. The local council also put up a barrier. But eventually, with the right architects, even these obstacles can be overcome and compromises found. Until a happy ending is in sight. The Yonder Architecture and Design office takes a very pragmatic approach and initially plans a small wooden house on stilts, which can be extended downwards in sections as required.
Written and directed by Birgit Eckelt. Editor: Sabine Reeh

The 6th season of “Traumhäuser” begins on Tuesday, February 23 at 10:45 p.m. on BR television and continues every Tuesday at the same time. Or available OnDemand in the BR-Mediathek.

More architecture on television? To mark the 50th anniversary of the Bavarian Chamber of Architects, Bayerischer Rundfunk showed the film series “Building for the Future“.

21.12.2024

Society

Change management – important or not?

Building design

Change management is not yet a major issue for landscape architects and planners. An overview of the challenges and opportunities.

01.12.2024

Exhibitions, Industry news, Research

“Counterfeiting is a systemic problem” – Interview with Hubertus Butin

Building design

Art historian, art theorist, publicist and curator Hubertus Butin. Photo: © Christiane Haid, Berlin

Hubertus Butin is an art historian, art theorist, publicist and curator. In the 1990s, he worked in Gerhard Richter’s studio in Cologne and published his catalog raisonné of editions in 2014. Today, he works as an appraiser for Richter’s works and is an expert on forgeries. RESTAURO spoke to him about his experiences

Hubertus Butin is an art historian, art theorist, publicist and curator. In the 1990s, he worked in Gerhard Richter’s studio in Cologne and published his catalog raisonné of editions in 2014. Today, he works as an expert on Gerhard Richter’s works and is an expert on forgeries. RESTAURO spoke to him about his experiences

RESTAURO: Mr Butin, how did you come to specialize in this field?

There is no other artist about whom I have published as much as I have about Gerhard Richter. If you are also the author of one of his catalogs raisonnés, it seems obvious that as an expert you should write expert reports on behalf of private collections, art dealers, auction houses, museums and investigating authorities. This is because authors of catalogs raisonnés usually not only have theoretical expertise, but also in-depth knowledge of objects.

Restauro: Can you name a particularly spectacular case that you helped to clarify? How did you proceed?

Hubertus Butin. A fraudster had come up with a clever provenance story by writing the following dedication on the back of a monochrome gray oil painting that is not in the catalog raisonné: “For Armin (K 20)”. This led the Berlin dealers, through whose hands the painting passed in 2005, to believe that it was a personal gift from Gerhard Richter to Professor Armin Zweite, the former director of the Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen in Düsseldorf. But when I asked Armin Zweite, he said he knew nothing about this dubious gift. In fact, the painting was a complete forgery. Today, the painting with its supposedly respectable past is in the possession of a collector in Vancouver, who acquired it in 2006 for a large sum as a supposed original. Both a simple provenance search and a stylistic examination of the painting confirmed the fraud.

RESTAURO: Not all fakes are clever. Can you give us an example of a particularly brazen forgery?

Hubertus Butin: A forger who tried to sell oil paintings on cardboard as works by Gerhard Richter via various auction houses from 2008 onwards was particularly criminally energetic. The paintings were confiscated by the police, and Richter himself wrote an expert report in which he clearly classified the works as forgeries. Proceedings were opened against the alleged perpetrator, and the expert report was then handed over by the police to the Düsseldorf public prosecutor’s office. There, either the forger himself or his lawyer stole this expert opinion during a file inspection and reproduced it using a copying machine. The forger then manipulated the document with the artist’s original signature in such a way that the letter now appeared to be a confirmation of authenticity, which the fraudster then used for further offers to sell a new series of abstract oil paintings. This case illustrates very clearly that fraudsters not only forge or falsify works of art, but sometimes also written documents such as certificates of authenticity, which are then used as a tool to sell the forgeries.

Restauro: In 2019, a forged oil painting in the style of Gerhard Richter appeared at Christie’s in New York. Were you consulted as an expert in this forgery case, in which the then Berlin gallery Michael Schultz was involved?

Yes, I was asked to examine the painting at the Berlin State Criminal Police Office. At first glance, it appeared to be the colored oil painting “Abstraktes Bild” by Gerhard Richter from 1989 with the catalogue raisonné number 705-2, but a close comparison with the illustration in the catalog raisonné of the paintings, written by Dietmar Elger, quickly revealed that it was a copy, a so-called forgery. This was very surprising, as Richter usually creates his abstract paintings with a squeegee, and such works cannot be exactly repeated. With this long, narrow strip of Plexiglas, the artist can create streaky color structures that cannot be precisely calculated and thus deliberately incorporate chance. Although it is impossible to copy this painting process, the forger has attempted to do just that. He succeeded to some extent with the colors and the composition, but inevitably failed in the details.
A simple examination of the material then revealed further evidence. Among other things, the back of the wooden stretcher frame, to which the canvas is attached with staples, was conspicuous. The stretcher frame was stamped with the FSC seal by its manufacturer. This stamp in the form of a stylized tree is intended to indicate that wood from ecologically sustainable forestry has been used. However, as the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) organization based in Bonn was only founded in 1993, the stretcher frame and the painting could not have been made in 1989. And there was nothing to suggest that the stretcher and the staples had been renewed at a later date. The forger also tried to remove the stamped batch number with a chisel, but was not completely successful. There is no reason for an artist to make this numbering disappear, but there is for a fraudster. Because this number can be used to determine the year of production of the stretcher frame.

The interview was conducted by Dr. Inge Pett.