At an exhibition curated by Mies van der Rohe at the Weissenhofsiedlung in Stuttgart in 1927, Bruno Taut, the leader of the secret society Die Gläserne Kette and one of the guest architects, designed a pavilion with multicoloured external walls and ceiling. Naturally, this riot of colours attracted broad disapproval, in particular from the architect of the adjoining pavilion, who was none other than Mies himself. The colours were reflected excessively on the orthodox façade of the modernist’s work, who expressed first his reservations and soon his anger. Taut responded to the attacks, saying: “If my project is not in accord with the others, that’s a fairly good sign, it doesn’t mean that the colours have been poorly used, simply that the neighbouring pavilions simply haven’t been finished.”

Nearly one hundred years later, Bernd Ribbeck’s small untitled paintings of the progression of a multicoloured geometric motif, representing a greatly simplified architectural feature flirting with abstraction and repeated right across the composition, seem to be a reiteration of that ancient squabble. However, it was neither Mies’ rationalist designs, nor Taut’s spiritualist utopias, that inspired Ribbeck’s series, but a French Brutalist project, Les Étoiles, constructed in Ivry-sur-Seine in the suburbs of Paris. Designed by the architects Renée Gailhoustet and Jean Renaudie, this set of buildings was built between 1969 and 1975, and owes its name to the sharply pointed triangular segments of raw concrete that overhang the architectural structure and are suggestive of some of Taut’s drawings published in his extravagant City Crown project (1919). Discovered by Ribbeck during a residency in Paris in 2022, the monumental Brutalist lines were first transcribed by the artist in sketches on small sheets of Bristol paper, his preferred medium for his creative meanderings.

In the gallery space in Fasanenplatz, the painting has disappeared to make way for a set of drawings. The lines drawn in red, blue, yellow and brown ballpoint pen, which stretch and cross each other to form complex lattices variably extended across the paper, once again depict architectural designs that neither Taut nor Van der Rohe would have disclaimed. The eye is presented less with plans than with abstract designs, which are easier to appreciate for themselves than for their potential as a future architecture.

These pyramidal, circular or parallelepipedal geometric shapes are repeated and systematised until they become pure motifs at the heart of the lattice. Here, architecture is no longer treated as an object of function but as ornament. What could be more impudent than to transform modernist functionalism into an ornamental pattern? In a perfect hybridisation, Ribbeck’s drawings establish a subtle interplay between the two contrasting aesthetics, the better to affirm that ornamentation is not a crime.

While the theosophical works of Hilma af Klint and Emma Kunz have often been referenced in connection with Bernd Ribbeck’s production, it would be interesting to consider his work in the light of Piranesi’s Imaginary Prisons, or the paintings of the Pattern & Decoration group. In Ribbeck’s works, it is not the crystal that – like in J.G. Ballard’s novel The Crystal World (1966) – multiplies indefinitely, but the architectures in their desire to build A New City Crown.

Marjolaine Lévy