Haus Lange and Haus Esters: Entering and Getting Lost

The house as experience between modernist order and contemporary disorientation
Text and drawings by Gianluca Costantini

Haus Lange and Haus Esters, drawing by Gianluca Costantini, spring 2026

After spending the morning at the Kaiser Wilhelm Museum, I make my way to the bus stop. I want to reach the other major museum site in Krefeld: Haus Lange and Haus Esters.

The stop is chaotic, full of confused movement, but only a few people board my bus. As it pulls away, the city slowly changes: the centre dissolves, giving way to a quieter, residential Krefeld. Through the window, elegant villas slide past—houses surrounded by greenery, still carrying the memory of the textile wealth that shaped this city.

Ludwig Mies van der Rohe – Architec, drawing by Gianluca Costantini, summer 2025

I get off not long after, in front of the two houses. They stand there discreetly, almost closed off toward the street. They were designed by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe between 1928 and 1930 for Hermann Lange and Josef Esters, silk industrialists and founders of the Vereinigte Seidenwebereien AG. Two twin houses, but not identical: geometric volumes, brick, restraint. And then, suddenly at the back, large openings that dissolve into a garden designed as an extension of interior space.

I walk toward the park. The houses are beautiful, but it is the garden that holds me: lawns, paths, sculptures. Everything seems designed to dissolve the boundary between inside and outside.

I enter.

The exhibition is by Gregor Schneider, Welcom, and from the very beginning something begins to shift. Rather than filling the space, Schneider subtly distorts it: walls are reconstructed within other walls, passages are blocked or diverted, and rooms appear identical only to reveal themselves as slightly altered versions of one another. As I move through the house, I gradually lose my sense of orientation, and the clarity of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe gives way to a quiet, persistent doubt.

Welcome, Gregor Schneider, drawing by Gianluca Costantini, summer 2025

It becomes clear that something deeper is unfolding. The modernist house, conceived as an expression of order, begins to behave like a psyche—unstable, layered, and experiential. The space is no longer neutral; it feels charged, almost sentient.

I continue through the rooms—kitchens, bathrooms, corridors—constantly drawn to the windows, where the garden seems to enter the building and pass through it. The boundary between inside and outside dissolves, and the house never feels entirely closed.

In one of the rooms, I encounter a work by Barry Flanagan from 1969: a piece of fabric, apparently abandoned, yet activated by both natural and artificial light. It is not simply an object, but a relationship—between matter and light, interior and exterior, presence and disappearance. In this subtle shift, even in his absence, I find myself thinking of Joseph Beuys.

During the 1960s, artists like Flanagan began working with humble materials—fabric, sand, felt—allowing their inherent properties to shape the work. Here, at Haus Lange, that exploration takes on a particular resonance: light itself becomes part of the artwork, and the space becomes material. The house, in turn, continues to speak.

Haus Lange and Haus Esters, drawing by Gianluca Costantini, summer 2025

In the 1920s, these rooms were inhabited by an educated bourgeoisie open to the avant-garde. Despite the geometric rigor, Mies had created warm, permeable interiors filled with thresholds and transitions. Then came the Second World War, and the houses lost their original function, becoming spaces marked by silence. In the postwar years, they were gradually transformed into exhibition venues, and in 1968 they were donated to the city, becoming part of the Kunstmuseen Krefeld alongside the Kaiser Wilhelm Museum. From that moment on, contemporary artists began to engage directly with the architecture—not through simple exhibitions, but through interventions.

In 1961, Yves Klein filled the rooms with his blue, dissolving the materiality of space, while later Christo altered and wrapped the interiors, shifting their perception. Each artist added a new chapter, and as I walk through the house, I feel as though I am moving across all these layers of time at once.

These houses were built to contain life; now they contain art, but not entirely. Something remains in the corridors—an echo, a lingering presence. The footsteps of former inhabitants still seem possible.

When I step back into the garden and turn around, it becomes clear why Haus Lange and Haus Esters resist definition: they are no longer houses, yet they are not only museums.

They remain an unfinished narrative.

Ludwig Mies van der Rohe wrote the beginning.
The artists continued it.

And anyone who walks through these spaces—even for a single afternoon—inevitably becomes part of the story.

This article is part of the research I am conducting for the creation of a graphic novel about the life of Joseph Beuys. The articles report on individual stops of the journeys I have undertaken to document my work.