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 fulfill the dream of the ultimate mobile factory. It was planned 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 unbuilt. 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 in a broader sense, questioning the formation of conceptions of history and the constitutions of power.

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