×
1:1 - DESIGN IMPRINTS! NOT BUILDINGS.
In the Holocene, we designed buildings and imprints emerged. In the Anthropocene, we must design the imprints so that contemporary buildings can emerge
Humans as a geological force - and thus every building - is involved in processes that take place in different places (locality), at different times (temporality), in different sizes (scale), and affect each other (entanglement). The impact of the processes is not always immediately visible, instead often manifesting themselves in another place or in the future (latency). Consequently, a building can no longer be referred to an object in the 'here and now'. In this sense, the exhibition invites the viewer to understand a building as a hyperobject (cf. Timothy Morton). This transformation of the way we look at architecture through the concept of the Anthropocene also has implications for design media and our architectural arguments. Indeed, in our current design practice, architectural aspects of temporality, locality, scale, latency, process, and entanglement are not represented and thus are only a marginal part of architectural discourse.
The title of the exhibition '1:1 - DESIGN IMPRINTS! NOT BUILDINGS...' is an allusion to scale, as an important tool in architectural practice, but in doing so directs attention to another immanent aspect of architecture; the relationship of 'imprints' in the environment and the 'building' as object. As paradigmatic imprints of architecture, the exhibition describes, among other things, the quarry in Brandenburg, the CO2 concentration in the atmosphere, oil and coal for heating, the rising sea level, power plants or the 'white tub'. But it also includes the offices with the building services planners and the grants for the energetic improvement of facades. The 14-hour day in the office and the picture with 10,478 likes on Instagram. 1:1 stands not only for the scale in which we encounter a building at the end of the design and construction process, but also for the relationship between the building as an object and the environment as the context of the building, and thus as the coexistence of the technosphere (cf. Peter Haff), the atmosphere, the lithosphere, the hydrosphere and the biosphere.
In this context, the exhibition '1:1 - DESIGN IMPRINTS! NOT BUILDINGS.' aims at an experimental and contemporary representation of architecture and works for this aim with the medial practice of collage. The designed collages equally place imprints and buildings next to each other, whereby imprints, as well as buildings, are represented by different processes at different places, times and scales, and thus latencies and entanglements can be made visible. For this purpose, scientific findings, data and statistics are linked with images, atmospheres and spatial configurations. Architectural and cultural arguments encounter numbers and findings from the natural sciences and the humanities, and intuitive and sensual knowledge about design meets facts and models from science. Each collage throws a glance at a thematic issue. However, the individual collage is not a self-contained view in itself but spans a 'field' with the other collages through references in image, form and text. In the collages, the imprints of architecture are made visible as a component of design and are thus intended to establish themselves as a new field of our design practice. The collages do not claim to be 'scientific' but they do work with scientific methods. At the same time, however, they should also be an expression of a new narrative and thus of an artistic/design attitude. In this regard, they oscillate between scientificity and design, whereby the intention is not to generate 'more knowledge', but to immerse oneself in the existing knowledge in order to find new associations and kinships within it (cf. Haraway: 'Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucen') and thus to work out new arguments for contemporary architecture. After all, in the present age and in order to design contemporary architecture, we need to equally juxtapose the environment and the architecture - imprints and buildings - 1:1.
A project in the scope of Post-Designosaur Studies.
Concept, design and collages by Till Zihlmann.
Technical implementation by Marcus Scheller.