One of the most interesting books I’ve come across recently, or one I’ve thought about the most, is one that only has small blocks of text every few pages—Purism in Concept, Form and Materials: The Pioneering Works of Hermann Rosa by Martin Bruhin. This book shows and discusses the houses and apartments that Rosa and his family lived in and built or drastically modified largely by hand during the 50s and 60s. Rosa was a German sculptor, and the book is fascinating for a number of reasons. Firstly, we get small narrative-like snippets of information about the life of the family—Rosa’s daughter Eva, for instance, talks about how the family and the friends they enlisted cleared sites and dug foundations with shovels, carting away rubble with wheelbarrows, like it was an archaeological dig. Rosa pulled down the interior walls of an early apartment they lived in and carried the broken-up material to nearby skips in a backpack. His wife Maria Rosa, a potter, mentions how the spaces, even when lived in by kids, were spare as though uninhabited.

It seems much of Rosa’s pre-war sculptural work was destroyed in Prague and Dresden during the war. His work is perhaps akin to that of Henry Moore, with large semi abstracted bodies or parts of bodies that look like they’d been crudely finished with a large spatula. Whether because of the destruction or for some other reason, Rosa was a kind of purist, who, while being very much a part of the art scene in Munich, was less concerned with producing work to sell and more concerned with creating work with a certain feeling of life. He stopped producing figurative work for a fourteen-year period while working on one particular house for the family, treating it as though it were a 1:1 model of itself. He designed as he went. Maria quotes Eva complaining that as soon as, say, a wall was finished it would be knocked down and remade slightly differently. Everything was considered for its functional ornamentation, including the gravel under the slab. The building work was ‘calm, rhythmic and contemplative’. We feel the labour that’s gone into it, we feel the thought processes, but also that it’s somehow natural, that it’s always been there.