FSB has republished the book ‘Begreifbare Baukunst’ (‘Tangible architecture’)

FSB book ‘Be­greif­bare Baukunst. Die Be­deu­tung von Türgrif­fen in der Ar­chitek­tur’ (‘Tan­gi­ble ar­chi­tec­ture. The im­por­tance of door handles in ar­chi­tec­ture’) was first pub­lished in 2009 and has since gone out of print. A new ex­tended edition has re­cently been re­leased, along with its English trans­la­tion. The cat­a­logue for the vis­it­ing ex­hi­bi­tion of the same name takes a closer look at a small, yet never in­signif­i­cant ar­chi­tec­tural details: the door handle.

It shows the full ver­sa­tile range of this object, with a se­lec­tion of im­por­tant his­tor­i­cal and con­tem­po­rary door handles in the context of the ar­chi­tec­ture for which they were de­signed.

The door handle is usually the first thing we touch when we enter a build­ing or room. Through its design and place­ment, it can give us a first glimpse at the ar­chi­tec­tural concept behind the build­ing.

Is it a tool or dec­o­ra­tion, is it ex­trav­a­gant or un­der­stated, does it make a cel­e­bra­tion out of opening the door or is it a sub­or­di­nate element? How does it feel in the hand? Is it heavy, light, er­gonomic or cum­ber­some? Does it invite us to grab it and enter or does it create dis­tance?

The book ad­dresses a number of other ques­tions of this type, demon­strat­ing that a door handle is not just a house­hold object, but ‘ar­chi­tec­ture in minia­ture’, as Bettina Rudhof puts it in her in­tro­duc­tion to the cat­a­logue.
This trea­tise on door handles was trig­gered by a ques­tion from Berlin ar­chi­tect Paul Kahlfeldt to FSB several years ago. He was looking for Schinkel’s his­toric fit­tings for his re­con­struc­tion of Schinkel's Build­ing Academy in Berlin.

Joint re­search on the handle brought about the idea to make an ex­hi­bi­tion ded­i­cated to door handles. The ac­com­pa­ny­ing cat­a­logue might not be able to offer the tan­gi­ble ex­pe­ri­ence of the ex­hi­bi­tion, but it does present a finely curated se­lec­tion of handles. It invites readers to travel through the history of the door handle, start­ing with his­tor­i­cal ex­am­ples by Karl Friedrich Schinkel, Le Cor­busier, Walter Gropius and Alvar Aalto, and con­tin­u­ing on to show con­tem­po­rary ex­am­ples.

On the way, the reader takes short detours through­out to learn about the pos­si­bil­i­ties that metal offers as a ma­te­r­ial and dis­cover what the dis­ap­pear­ance of Gropius Bauhaus handles is about. The reader also learns about de­signer Otl Aicher’s four-point guide to grip: ‘The thumb always looks for a di­rec­tion’.

The book pre­sents the in­ex­haustible ver­sa­til­ity of the shapes and designs that can be packed into the small object.

It shows, for example, Ludwig Wittgen­stein’s famous pared-down door handle for his palace in Kund­man­ngasse in Vienna, Jasper Mor­ri­son's func­tional classic, the FSB 1144 door handle, the colour­ful post-mod­ern re­design of the Gropius handle by Alessan­dro Mendini, and much more.

Even just flip­ping through the book to dis­cover the ref­er­ence pro­jects and rein­ter­pre­ta­tions gives readers new insight and shows that the reper­toire of shapes and form in door handle design still has space for more ideas.