Tips for your home. Domestic dreams and everyday realities

Like a kind of ‘Where’s Wally’ picture, the ink drawings and watercolours of Lutz Brandt (1938–2024) give us an imaginary look inside ‘our own four walls’. The architect and graphic artist produced these images in large numbers from the mid 1970s to 1983 for Neue Berliner Illustrierte (NBI), Das Magazin, and other publications. Today I read these interior studies as the private side of East Germany’s 1973 Housing Construction Programme, intended to greatly improve the country’s housing conditions not only through the erection of new housing estates, but also through the preservation and modernization of existing building stock.
Brandt’s suggestions appeared in columns like ‘Tips for the Apartment’, with readers submitting questions and ideas on how to design multi-purpose furniture, how to repurpose a wall unit, how to best use an old building’s sloped ceiling space, how to convert and separate a galley kitchen, and how to set up a solidarity bazaar in a building estate lobby. In these pages, domestic dreams and everyday realities are brought back to life.

So how does design come into the picture? Designer objects are not the centre of attention here, but instead fit into an interplay of heirloom pieces, found objects, DIY solutions, and pre-existing furnishings. Only insiders knew the names of the designers. Trained by old hands of the Deutscher Werkbund and Bauhaus movements, East Germany’s designers did their best under limited production conditions to achieve maximum functionality and aesthetic appeal, combined with durability and up-to-date styles. This meant no auteur design, no worshipping of distinction. And yet there are things on every page that are seen as design icons today, such as the Heli K20 speaker ball, the ‘Kontrast’ table lamp, and the plastic furniture of the Variopur collection. With the present selection, we put a few highlights under the magnifying glass.
What is retrotopia? For me, it’s the feeling of private spaces where people can live the way they want, where everyone has a home and a livelihood. Dwellings where devices aren’t collecting data, and the smart home is still far away. Or is that just nostalgia?