Author: Jordan Todorov / Source: Atlas Obscura
Karl-Ludwig Lange is a German photographer known for his black-and-white photos of Berlin. Starting in the late 1960s, he made a name for himself as a restless flaneur with a camera, capturing the architecture and street life of Germany’s capital. Over the decades, he has documented the city’s political and cultural shifts.
But Lange is more than a prominent photographer—he is also one of the biggest brick collectors in the world.Sixty-nine-year-old Lange has been stockpiling bricks for almost 30 years now. He says he owns more than 1,800 unique bricks, weighing a good 14,000 pounds. Each one of the artifacts in Lange’s mammoth collection bears its own design and stamp and resides on specially constructed, floor-to-ceiling wooden shelves in his apartment in Wedding, a district in Northwest Berlin.
The humble chunk of baked clay first captured his attention after a chance encounter in 1990, when he got an assignment with the architectural magazine Bauwelt to photograph an old brick furnace, built in 1868, which sat 22 miles west of Berlin in the state of Brandenburg.
“It’s the only faithfully preserved ring furnace in Europe, built after plans by the great inventor Friedrich Eduard Hoffmann,” says Lange. “The German government had decided to save it and to use it to make facade bricks for reconstruction of churches and other public buildings in Berlin.”
The magazine published Lange’s photos in early 1991. Soon after, he learned that in Freiwalde, another town in Brandenburg, about 41 miles south of Berlin, there was another working brick factory. “That’s what really got me started,” says Lange.
Lange became so obsessed with the history of bricks and brick-making around Berlin that in the years that followed, he managed to locate the ruins of hundreds of factories. He did so using more than 250 Prussian military maps from the mid-19th century, essentially turning himself into an industrial archaeologist.
The trigonometric maps Lange used are amazingly accurate. They were prepared with the use of the triangulation method, which utilizes three points to determine a desired location. A lot of churches and brick factories were used as “trig points,” as often these were the only solid buildings in an otherwise predominantly agricultural region. Lange likens the Prussian military maps, with their vast amount of detail, to the Domesday Book, a comprehensive record of landholding from 11th-century England.
“I found 150-year old trees marked on the maps that were still there—we’re talking about that level of detail!” remembers Lange.
All in all, over three decades, Lange says he has visited more than 1,300 brick factories in around 350 towns and villages in the vicinity of Berlin. Only eight…
The post Inside Berlin’s Secret Brick Museum appeared first on FeedBox.