[3] In order to create the coop using authentic half-timber construction (
Fachwerk in German), Niko salvaged beams from a barn, originally built in the 1880s, that had collapsed under heavy loads of snow.
(28) The region is dotted with
Fachwerk (half-timbered) towns like Goslar with its Medieval roots, and is a place that has bred many Teutonic legends and fairy tales.
Fachwerk. Fur Bajan, Schlagzeug, und Streichorchester.
In this case, the artist began by taking photographs of two nearby buildings made with timber-frame architecture (in German,
Fachwerk, "framework")--one an authentic seventeenth-century building, the other a 1980s reconstruction of a building that had, like the royal palace, been a casualty of the war.
There was certainly an accord between the exposed steel frameworks of postwar American buildings by Mies van der Rohe and others and the visibly accessible tectonics of old vernacular North European and New England "halftimbering" (
Fachwerk, in German).
To go with the German theme, the architecture is a contemporary version of the
fachwerk construction style found in small German towns and villages.