Stephen Willats

Since the early 1980s, Stephen Willats has created in Berlin various works in which he focuses in particular on the residential concepts of modernism and on the people who live in the high-rise complexes built during that era. Willats considers the architecture of our cities to especially express social values and standards. The ideological messages that are legible in the form, décor and material composition of buildings frequently stand in stark contradiction to the lifestyles of their individual residents and thereby give rise to a highly charged semantic triangle of buildings, the meanings ascribed to them, and the everyday reality of those who live in them. Journey Into The Ideological Tower - Reise in den ideologischen Turm belongs to a group of works created in 2003 and focusing on various architectural complexes in East and West Berlin which provide particularly clear evidence of the political ideologies of the former West and East that were inscribed into the architecture. For the work, Willats asked the resident of a building located at Straussberger Platz on the former Stalinallee (today the Karl-Marx-Allee) and built in1951 by the architect Herman Hanselmann, to use a Super-8 camera to document his progression from the boulevard up the stairway to his apartment. …. the individual images of the pathway are arranged on the pictorial panels in categories that gradually guide the viewer from panoramic outdoor perspectives to architectural details and signs of wear. Willats thereby juxtaposes the standardized, social-political view of the world from the era of the building's construction with the everyday reality of its current inhabitants.Philipp Ziegler, 2016, text for Good Space - politische, ästhetische und urbane Räume, Villa Merkel 2016

Since the early 1980s, Stephen Willats has created in Berlin various works in which he focuses in particular on the residential concepts of modernism and on the people who live in the high-rise complexes built during that era. Willats considers the architecture of our cities to especially express social values and standards. The ideological messages that are legible in the form, décor and material composition of buildings frequently stand in stark contradiction to the lifestyles of their individual residents and thereby give rise to a highly charged semantic triangle of buildings, the meanings ascribed to them, and the everyday reality of those who live in them. Journey Into The Ideological Tower - Reise in den ideologischen Turm belongs to a group of works created in 2003 and focusing on various architectural complexes in East and West Berlin which provide particularly clear evidence of the political ideologies of the former West and East that were inscribed into the architecture. For the work, Willats asked the resident of a building located at Straussberger Platz on the former Stalinallee (today the Karl-Marx-Allee) and built in1951 by the architect Herman Hanselmann, to use a Super-8 camera to document his progression from the boulevard up the stairway to his apartment. …. the individual images of the pathway are arranged on the pictorial panels in categories that gradually guide the viewer from panoramic outdoor perspectives to architectural details and signs of wear. Willats thereby juxtaposes the standardized, social-political view of the world from the era of the building's construction with the everyday reality of its current inhabitants.Philipp Ziegler, 2016, text for Good Space - politische, ästhetische und urbane Räume, Villa Merkel 2016