archdiploma2009 – Material Visions
The subtitle of the archdiploma2009 exhibition, Material Visions, refers to a duality that underlies architectural practice as a combination of art and technology: the artistic vision of an architect is incomplete without its technical realisation. At the same time, the title also refers to a similar duality in the institution of an exhibition: rather than an immaterial moment of pure consciousness, vision is a material act of the body. Hence, this exhibition not only celebrates the students’ architectural visions but also focuses on the act of seeing as a physical action. This is achieved by setting up different situations of looking at the exhibits and also acknowledging the temporal dimension of looking. In other words, the exhibition itself is staged as an architectural event.
For reasons that have to do with the contingent history of academic disciplines, architecture is often grouped together with painting and sculpture as one of the visual arts, one that focuses on (interior) space as opposed to planar compositions or volumetric developments. Coupled with the modernist ideology of purity, this idea leads architects to focus on visual space as the essence of their art. Yet, architecture is inherently impure or theatrical in the specific sense intended by modernist critics, such as Michael Fried. In his seminal essay ›Art and Objecthood‹ Fried claimed that a minimalist sculpture could not be understood optically in terms of its own visual composition because it depends on the beholder and is incomplete without him. For Fried, such dangerous theatricality involves the commingling of the viewer’s space and the space of the artistic work, the temporal unfolding of the experience created by the work and the somatic apprehension of scale – all qualities that are central to architecture.
The exhibition design aims to call attention to all of these aspects of the architectural experience. Thus, a series of different viewing situations is set up, involving different scales, distances, body positions and movements, as well as forcing a certain temporality to the foreground. Upon approaching the exhibition venue, the visitor might first catch a view of the media mesh wall that fills the entire wall of the Kunsthalle on the side of the Rechte Wienzeile with images of the projects in the show. Inside the gallery, it is possible to get quite close to the media mesh and examine how the image is created – at closer distance, however, the large-scale digital image disappears and the media mesh allows for views to the outside.
A different setup is provided opposite the media mesh. Video images of design diplomas are projected onto a curved screen wall, designed parametrically with an algorithm that derives complex shapes from the viewer’s and projector’s positions. While these images can be looked at much in the same way as in traditional museums – with the viewer standing before the screen at a respectful distance – only a few viewing points provide for an undistorted image, thus implying the preferred perspectives. Moreover, additional information about the projects can be gleaned from looking through the screen where models and drawings are positioned. Thus, the visitors will have to use their bodies to get information about the design projects.
In addition to design projects, the exhibition also includes diploma theses oriented towards research, both from the field of architecture and planning. Such work cannot be appreciated in an instant, and thus the exhibition design takes on another aspect of the modern art museum. Half of the Kunsthalle is already functioning as a café, and this function is extended to the gallery space by presenting the theoretical diploma theses on café tables. Sitting relaxed on bean bags and sipping coffee, visitors will be able to view films that allow a view into the world of research.
As a whole, the exhibition design attempts to respond to the kind of modernist space it occupies as theorised by the phenomenological philosophers Edmund Husserl and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Although it is oriented in various ways, the gallery space aspires to being neutral and homogeneous. But the living body and its bodily space break the homogeneity asunder. What counts for the orientation of the spectacle is not the given space in its physical definition, nor the body as the zero point of experience, but the visitor’s body as a system of possible actions, a virtual body with its phenomenal ›place‹ defined by its task and situation. As Merleau-Ponty states, ›my body is wherever there is something to be done‹ and the space that we experience is constituted by such a dynamic body.
Merleau-Ponty wants to break down the Cartesian subject-object dichotomy and proposes instead the concept of ›flesh‹ as the substance that is sensible in two ways: it senses and it is sensed at the same time. Interestingly, vision is also divided in itself in the same chiasmatic way. The word ›vision‹ refers to both the faculty and the act of looking as well as the object of such an act, namely that which is seen. Vision is thus the agent, the action and the object.
Kari Jormakka, Dörte Kuhlmann, Oliver Schürer, Curators
Link: www.archdiploma.at
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