Hans Hans Dieter Schaal, Selected Works / Ausgewählte Arbeiten 1971-2023

»In his note to the edition of Neue Landschaftsarchitektur / New Landscape Architecture published 1994 in England as Landscape as Inspiration, Geoffrey Jellicoe compares my drawing considerations with the works of Paul Klee. What at first sounds a bit highfalutin is correct insofar as I do not move exclusively in the banal everyday and functional space in everything I draw, design and realise, but always reflect second and third surrealities as well. »Art does not reproduce the visible, but makes visible«, how Paul Klee formulated the process. Every viewer and reader could rightly ask the question: What do such expressions of art have to do with every-day architecture?
I think: a great deal, and that is because all architectural problems and their solutions are multi-layered, just like pure works of art. Every building summarises and redefines its architectural, urban, village and landscape surroundings. Intentionally or unintentionally, exaggerated or restrained, each building can look like a meteor or bomb strike, an inconspicuous remark or a beautification attack.
I am interested in the past, the present and the future of an urban or landscape site. My view wants to integrate archaeological working methods just as much as functional fulfilments and imaginative-surreal, sometimes utopian efflorescence. I would never go so far as to formulate: Architecture is the necessary, and art is the unnecessary.
Of course, every artist-architect who embarks on this complicated-complex path will have difficulties with the banal, seemingly superficial everyday reality in nature, the landscape and the city. It is therefore not surprising that I have only been able to realise a few architectural and visual productions and that, in the course of the last decades, I have been increasingly pushed into the areas of stage design and other design areas.
At the moment, thanks to the ecological movement, hardly anyone is interested in the connection between art and architecture. More important are sustainability and zero-energy houses in which the windows can hardly be opened.
Could it be that building culture, indeed the whole of culture, will soon sink into green primeval forests and huge wetland biotopes? Or will foreign, warlike peoples destroy or occupy our cities and landscapes and cultivate them anew?