German artist Gregor Schneider (born 1969) is known for his uncanny explorations of psychologically charged architectural spaces, most notably the domestic space of his childhood home, where he has lived—and has been continuously reconstructing—since the age of sixteen. The title of this ongoing work, Haus ur, refers to the street address of the house, Unterheydener Strasse 12 in Rheydt, Germany; but the word “ur” also translates as “original,” a concept that Schneider calls into question by repeatedly reworking the interior of the house so the original is impossible to locate. While the house’s suburban exterior remains unchanged, its interior has undergone countless alterations, including walls in front of walls, ceilings under ceilings, and rooms within rooms; cupboards morphed into doors and doors onto dead ends; leaded floors and soundproof chambers. More “personal” items, such as photographs—which are present throughout—punctuate these transformed spaces, resulting in a claustrophobic environment that is deeply disorienting, both physically and psychologically, for those visitors who enter inside.

This iteration of Viewpoints features a video by Schneider of his own navigations through the labyrinthine interior of Haus ur. As one of a series of ten unique “tours” recorded by the artist, it elaborates the house’s internal structure and multiplies its psychological provocations. In Schneider’s video the camera functions like an extension of the artist’s body, creating shaky effects and a narrow visual field that heightens the level of ambiguity implicit to Haus ur and extends its disorientating effect into the gallery.

Gregor Schneider was awarded the Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale in 2001 for his reconstruction of Haus ur in the German Pavilion. In 2003, this “new” work, called Totes Haus ur (Dead House ur), was installed for a year at the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art. 

This iteration of Viewpoints features a collectively written response to Gregor Schneider’s Haus ur Amateur Video, January 1998 led by Hunter Hoffman, who is faculty in the University of Washington departments of mechanical engineering, radiology, and psychology, and studies virtual reality pain distraction and human memory. Hoffman invited colleagues and students who study social science and architecture to think alongside him in generating this multi-perspective interpretation. Collaborators include Teresa Moroseos, Mariana Sampaio, Chloé JoHannah Simon, and Paula Dana “mimi” Simon.

Adolf Loos, one of the most influential European architects of the late nineteenth century, advocated that a home should set the stage for domestic life and enable the inhabitants to freely live out their culture. He believed that the role of domestic architecture was not to impose a particular style, but rather that it is the role of art to show people new directions. Art “thinks of the future,” while the house “thinks of the present.” Gregor Schneider’s Haus ur blurs this boundary between art and house, turning the domestic act of inhabiting space into an artwork that probes the meaning and expectations of home. Schneider’s video takes the viewer through a deliberate series of bleak, small rooms connected by tight, mangled in-between spaces. The camera pauses on the rooms that have the familiar makings of a bedroom, a dining room, suggesting that these are spaces of the present, stages in which people perform the rituals of everyday life. The in-between connective corridors are confusing, a jumbled network that turns the domestic interior into a treacherous maze of trickery.

As a result, Schneider’s house is itself an active character that defies permanence and knowability. It is alive, physically, constantly evolving with construction processes laid bare and layers upon layers of material visible. While it was commonplace in ancient settlements for each generation to reinforce a dwelling’s framework with more brick, earth, or wood, Schneider’s use of this approach reads like a malignant cancer, expanding too quickly, and causing a haphazard disruption of domestic function. Rather than a state of preservation, Schneider’s construction is in a state of destruction with mortality written into every layer. 

Human perception and memory are both reconstructive processes. Our own expectations influence much of what we see and remember. After a memory is formed, it can be altered by new information, embellished or exaggerated by imagination. For example, when watching Schneider’s video tour of Haus ur one viewer associated the house with catacombs, and thus remembers seeing skulls inside the house, despite the fact that there were none.    

Schneider takes the malleability of memory to a heightened level in Haus ur. The artist’s ongoing construction and re-building project inside his childhood home makes the processes of memory material. The original interior structure is overwritten by a series of convoluted constructions: a round manhole drilled through the floor of the living room allows visitors to climb down to the floor below, and a window opens up to a brick wall rather than an exterior view. Nothing is sure or stable in this alternative reality that takes on the form of a pathological architecture rife with morbid and compulsive characteristics. Schneider’s video tour inside these spaces is disorienting and evokes questions about the dark caverns of the mind and its twisted capabilities.

Schneider’s alternate dimension in the world of Haus ur might be interpreted as the artist’s way of processing historic trauma from the past. Virtual reality therapy is designed to access people’s memories of traumatic events, and help them better cope with the extreme emotions evoked by distressing memories. Unlike virtual reality therapy worlds (e.g. a simulation of the September 11 attacks), Schneider did not design Haus ur as therapy for visitors, but rather for himself. Perhaps, Haus ur is an invitation to visitors to empathize and experience what it is like to be Gregor Schneider.