From the Archive: With the Witchy Hexenhaus, Modernism Met "Lord of the Rings"

As a part of our 25th-anniversary celebration, we’re republishing formative magazine stories from before our website launched. This story previously appeared in Dwell’s April/May 2005 issue.

Located in the midst of the woods that inspired the fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm, the Hexenhaus ("witch’s house") inhabits the territory of both architectural discourse and timeless fantasy. If ever modernism could be said to meet The Lord of the Rings, it’s here.

Hyperintellectual English architects Alison and Peter Smithson are better known for their controversial brutalist monuments built between the 1940s and 1970s, such as Robin Hood Gardens and the Economist Building (both in London), as well as for their sinuous plastic-fantastic 1956 House of the Future. Here, they took an existing "found" house and applied their principles, developed in the 1980s, of "conglomerate ordering." Through a sequence of modest yet revolutionary interventions, they changed the structure’s nature totally.

The Hexenhaus is typical of the Smithsons’ later work (Alison passed away in 1993, Peter in 2003) in that it featured a long-term relationship with the client, Axel Bruchhäuser, head of furniture company Tecta. Starting with Axel’s Porch in 1986 and ending with the Lantern Pavilion in 2001, the Smithsons turned a traditional house inside out, through a series of deft touches and delicately realized additions. These pierced the original four walls with a sequence of pavilions, footbridges, annexes, and even a watchtower poised on spindly legs, all linked by walkways connecting interior and exterior and the different levels of the hillside setting and wooded landscape.

The forms are organic, with large expanses of glass framed by stepped mullions—a modernist Gothic. From all points of the house and its outposts, the view is one of "branches that move and branches that don’t," as the Smithsons put it. The layering of real and architectural boughs is reminiscent of fan vaulting only with a kinetic energy. The whole house, in fact, invites you to move through it, with paths appearing before you wherever you turn.

The Hexenbesenraum ("witch’s broom cupboard"), a kind of watchtower (a popular local form) perched on wooden stilts among the trees, serves as a welcome resting point. Not so much an observatory as a kind of sanctuary or hermitage, it allows views only through narrow slits of windows. A tree-level walkway snakes its way between the bathroom of the Hexenhaus proper and the Hexenbesenraum.

The Upper Walkway also links the house with the Tree Pavilion (1997), a thatched roof hovering on unfeasibly skinny legs and pierced by glass, and the astonishing Lantern Pavilion, with its extraordinary asymmetrical form and interlaced construction. The poetry the Smithsons achieved on this project is nowhere more evident than here, with its semicircular symbols of sun and moon, its lacy structure of sectioned glass, and a white polished-marble floor reflecting the beams and branches above—all creating visionary effects of light, perspective, and a kind of fragmented unity.

See more from the Dwell archive on US Modernist.

Related Reading:

From the Archive: Bertrand Goldberg’s Humanist Architectural Vision

From the Archive: Andrea Zittel’s Tiny, Prophetic Joshua Tree Laboratory