Hannes M actually hated straight lines and was secretly in favour of Baroque ornamentation. His granddaughter discloses this secret, putting her life at risk. Meanwhile, a neighbour gets carried away with his zest for renovation and destroys the Amber Room, which had been stored in boxes in his garden shed. Another resident elsewhere on the estate can no longer see white surfaces. His creative drive incurs the fatal wrath of his friend.
These fictional stories unfold in Törten, imagined as a crime scene where virtually all protagonists have a skeleton in the closet. Twenty students at the Anhalt University of Applied Sciences, under the guidance of Professor Natascha Meuser, developed ideas for crime stories to shed new light on the workers’ estate designed by Walter Gropius in Törten between 1926 and 1928. This unorthodox approach to architectural pedagogy helped the students gain a deeper understanding of the world-famous row houses and became the genesis of The Törten Project: Murder and Crime Mysteries from a Bauhaus Estate. This small volume takes the reader behind the chaste white facades. It presents quirky narratives about mysterious entanglements, morbid secrets, and grisly intrigues, describing – almost incidentally – the buildings and their details.
