Symposium I
Symposium II
Exhibition / 52-Hour-Lab
Jean-Baptiste Joly
Vorbemerkungen zu
»Dealing with Fear«


Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht
Since When and Why Are We Afraid
of the Future?


Bertrand Bacqué, Ingrid Wildi Merino
Beetween Fear as a Spectacle
and Interiorized Fear


Vadim Bolshakov
Genetic Roots of Instinctive
and Learned Fear


David N. Bresch
Von irrationalen Ängsten
zu versicherbaren Risiken


Paula Diehl
Dealing with Fear
The Mise en Scène of the SS
in National Socialist Propaganda


Björn Franke
Violent Machines for Troubled Times


Teresa Hubbard, Beate Söntgen
Home and Fear
An Email-Conversation
after the Symposium’s Talk


Iassen Markov, Stephan Trüby
Temple of Janus 2.0
The 5 Codes_Space of Conflict


Jürgen Mayer H., Henry Urbach
Mind the Gap
A Transcript of the Symposium’s Talk


Matthias Aron Megyeri
Sweet Dreams Security® Est. 2003
Notes from an Orwellian City


Jasmeen Patheja, Hemangini Gupta
Fear as Experienced
by Women in Their Cities

Ortwin Renn, Andreas Klinke
Von Prometheus zur Nanotechnologie
Der gesellschaftliche Umgang
mit Risiken und Bedrohungen


Gabi Schillig
The Politics of Lines.
On Architecture/War/Boundaries
and the Production of Space


Gerald Siegmund, Maren Rieger
Die Another Day: Dealing with Fear

Jens Martin Skibsted, Adam Thorpe
Liberty versus Security:
Bikes versus Bombs


Helene Sommer
High over the Borders
Stories of Hummingbirds, Crying Wolves,
and the Bird’s Eye View


Yi Shin Tang
Dealing with the Fear of Abuse
of Intellectual Property Rights
in a Globalized Economy


Margarete Vöhringer
Keine Angst im Labor
Nikolaj Ladovskijs psychotechnische
Architektur im postrevolutionären Moskau


Susanne M. Winterling
Dealing with Fear: an Inside
and an Outside Perspective



Photo Gallery

Jürgen Mayer H., Henry Urbach
Mind the Gap
A Transcript of the Symposium’s Talk


Henry Urbach (HU)

Fear, I think, is so central to my work that it has been a kind of blind spot; the chance to consider how it winds its way and animates my own practice has been eye-opening and more illuminating than I expected. As Jürgen and I prepared today’s talk we asked ourselves if our work runs in parallel. In different ways, we are both committed to working—to intervening—in the public realm and we started to wonder if this commitment is a way of working against fear, the kind of fear that structures so much normative discourse. What fears are we afraid of? Fear of difference, fear of the other, maybe even fear of architecture and its capacity to transform collective experience. Time and time again, we discovered, our work presses against these fears and we have each developed certain strategies for doing so.

There are the darker strategies and the lighter ones. On the darker side we tend to explore issues such as the uncanny, the sublime, hybrids, mutants, disjunctions, and so forth. At times we revert to classical avant-garde strategies such as the Verfremdungseffekt announced by Bertolt Brecht or the Situationist notion of détournement. Yet, perhaps in a way that is very 1990s, the time when our ideas took form, we also share an interest in play and embodied experience that leads us to explore strategies of seduction and what we might call serious fun. At this point, for both of us, this double-edged approach is quite conscious and serves (we hope!) to draw people into the worlds we make and engage with them more deeply than they otherwise might. We both like to capture attention, build trust, and then offer a surprise, a way of thinking about things and spaces and social relations afresh. We try to draw people into experimental architecture, away from conventions that are so numbing and into a kind of new collective experience. So, maybe with those introductory words I will pass the baton to Jürgen.


Jürgen Mayer H. (JMH)

I think that in the introduction, somehow, we got through the speakers before us was quite ideal and I would even like to use this term un-conditioning as something that drives us or is important—at least in my work—where certain expectations will be triggered and re-thought and questioned through the work that we were doing. Also, maybe, we should say that we both met in Princeton and so there were moments where we were very closely working together and moments where there was, of course, a kind of distance. Even in terms of thinking or just in reality then. But I also thought that this panel would be a great moment to actually reflect back on what happened in the past 15 years, which is quite a long period. So, I am showing some of the work that happened in our office that started around 1996 and definitely came out of this discussion that we both experienced in the 1990s based on gender and queer studies. And I think, in a way to tie it back to Princeton where all these discussions were occurring was quite puzzling for a German architect, who was then trained: “This is an architectural program, this is a site—make a nice building.” Maybe there was a discussion about style or context relations. But beyond that, seeing architecture as a cultural essay as a commentary or as a means to question certain conditions or conventions, was really new and, in a way, uncomfortable. So, coming out of school and coming back to Germany confronting this thinking with, again, a kind of very clear understanding of what architecture is how an architect works, kind of sidetracked me to do installation work and to do smaller work in a gallery context or art context. And I think now after maybe ten years of working slowly from installation work and objects towards architecture it is a quite interesting moment to look back and see where that led us. And, in a way, it became an architectural production from really happening in niches to being in the center of towns and communities. And I think that is most moving for me because I see that there was a need and that there is a certain success in this attractiveness and re-thinking of communal spaces and bringing people out of conditions of expectation and observation towards wanting to be involved and celebrating a group experience of spaces and cities or, if you want to call it, urban experience.

So, I am going through some projects that have relationships to fear and might be, in a way, the reality that we are facing nowadays. And I am starting with an installation proposal as an exhibition design we were invited to display at the ZKM in Karlsruhe. The exhibition was called Controlled Space then curated by Tom Levin. And Controlled Space brought together, maybe for the first time, artwork related to surveillance and risk society or control society. And our understanding of this was to take the 3,000 square meters of the exhibition space as a flat surface, placing the artwork, of course in coordination with Tom Levin and his curator’s concept, and then start to create a certain modulated landscape—this was 2000/2001—according to the art work. There had to be a certain platform to show; there were dark chambers for videos and projections; there were larger paintings or photography that had to go on walls. We have the best view as human beings being upright in surveying flat landscape, now with this artificial landscape and the hills there is a certain blockage in view. And that is when technology comes in. And we have aerial cameras, we have motion detectors, we have light barriers, and so forth, infrared sensors. And all of that technology was already part of the exhibition because the artwork was also dealing with that technology anyway. So there were teddy bears with built-in surveillance cameras where parents could control their children while they play or observe them. There were certain web launches where we could look at artwork that was only happening on the web. For example, I think there was a New York performance group that performed exclusively in front of surveillance cameras on streets for the people watching or controlling these monitors—addressing questions of hierarchy and control. We came up with a kind of a barcode system that got adjusted to the specifics of the exhibition space. We worked, and I think this was part of our main interest, on architecture not only as a display system, but as something that actively becomes part of the exhibition experience. So, we collaborated with a software company that developed black-and-white checkerboard codes, individual codes that you now sometimes see on envelopes. And the idea was that if you go and buy your ticket, you would get a little sticker, you put it on, you would have an individual black-and-white pattern and all the cameras in the exhibition space would be linked to software that could trace you while you go through the exhibition space. I know, this is all very standard now, but in 2000 and 2001 it was a little bit more eye-opening than today (We all know now that if you walk around with your mobile phone, you can be traced everywhere). We simulated some personalities from high interest to low attention span, from being really involved in the beginning but then losing it towards the end. So basically, when you check out, you would get your personal walking drawing and only then you would notice that you had been followed or left traces. Our interest was not only a recording, but next time you visited you could be the one, who draws actively or consciously by going through the exhibition.






All of this was not realized because of the economy’s crash. All the money went into the heavy catalogue—which is really impressive. The exhibition design itself ended up being quite straightforward: just white walls and white cubes. But what survived from our concept was the first thing that we were asked for in the very beginning, which you see as these red pads. And these red pads were somehow mouse pads for the computer, now seating pads and they were painted and colored with temperature sensitive paint. And maybe it was the only artwork in the exhibition that dealt with biometrics—with a certain sensual experience in interaction with the visitor beyond the all-over present surveillance cameras. And in a way, sadly enough, the exhibition became very actual because it opened two weeks after 09/11. And at that point the whole discussion was about biometrics. What I find interesting in this work, which actually came out of an exhibition that Henry co-curated in New York in 1994 called queer space, was that it was all about bringing out certain invisible things, actions of performative repetition, acting as coming-out strategies and so forth. The world by now kind of lost its queer context in a way or it has become more complex. Now it is more clearly about giving a certain biometric discussion to the work. At the same time, it also showed that there is no such thing as an innocent naive architectural surface anymore. Whatever we do, wherever we walk or whatever we touch, we leave certain traces and we leave our marks and that is another way of production.

Since that took a little longer as a starting point, I can show you now a couple of works that happened or that work along that line of this tracing, leaving marks, bringing out something that is invisible. Seducing people after a first minor shock when you see that actually you display your underwear, you display certain information about your body, you show a temperature landscape of your body. After that first shock happens you would start to play. There is a certain interaction and a feedback that starts to happen. That goes from smaller objects to larger spaces. And this was the last show that happened in Henry’s gallery in 2005, which was called In Heat, and it took these walls or these surfaces onto the architectural surfaces, onto seating elements. The exhibition was a portrait gallery where you would only see if you directly interacted with the architectural surfaces. Another continuation of that was a large installation this year at the Vitra museum. In this case, this kind of graphic became even more a super graphic. In that case, it echoed Frank Gehry’s architecture into the interior. And also, for the first time, we decided to build in hot wires, where certain temporary ornaments would appear and disappear by heating up the wires or letting them cooling down. There was already a kind of a built-in reaction ornament that would disappear and appear at the same time the body would come onto the space and leave traces.




Another obsession is “data protection patterns.” I am collecting those since 1994 because I wanted to add something to the temperature sensitive work when I was invited to do an installation in Chicago on a show called Disappeared. And I discovered these patterns because I wanted to add a guest book to my house-warming installation. And the guest book was then printed with these data protection patterns that you find on the inside of envelopes or on multiple forms and that are meant to erase information on multiple forms. Because you have to print the information like one sheet but then the sheet goes to different people. So the one that delivers does not necessarily need to know how much something costs, gets delivered, and so forth. Or a pin number from your bank would be covered with a pattern. It is a kind of neutral surface and I would like to see it also as a metaphor that there is a kind of a neutral public face and a personal content or a personal, deeper layer. There was one fusion of pattern or a lot of fusions of patterns and temperature sensitive paint and this was the first piece we did for Henry. Bed sheets were again issues of the ornament. The white clean surface versus stains and traces, even issues of boredom and a whole kind of bed literature occurs. You cannot find sleep, you are constantly turning around yourself. It is the own body shadow that leaves you and follows you. That led to a couple of installation works. In this case, data protection patterns on architectural surfaces dealt with a pre-wall or I call this “pre-text” (Vor-wand)—it was about discussing boundaries and spacial limitations and questioning the idea of “in front” and “behind,” or “before” and “after.”



Then this cools down and becomes integral elements in real buildings. In this case, a town hall that is located just outside of Stuttgart. And you will find these patterns now in floors or in balconies even kind of ornaments that are air ventilation shafts or gaps in the building. And in a way they become metaphors or maybe better, a contemporary ornament that deals with this kind of early information control around 1900. That is when the pattern appeared. With carbon paper and the possibility of writing original and copy at the same time, and therefore has a kind of certain prototypal function in how we deal with information and control nowadays in a digital age.

I am jumping now to an architectural project where you saw the details before. And in a way it works for me conceptually because that is a town hall that actually deals with the data of its citizens. The town hall became kind of a manifestation for a movement in public administrations called the transparent town hall or the virtual town hall. And this city Ostfildern was one of three cities in Germany that won the competition called “Media@com” (how do new city administrations nowadays deal with new technology, internet, new media, and data handling). What are the advantages of dealing with the citizens via these new communication devices? You could hand in your building permit via internet, even the 3D-data, and slowly a whole 3D-set would grow not only with the masses of the building of the outside but even the interiors of the building. And just imagine—back to the first work that we saw—that you walk around with your mobile phone, you could be traced wherever you are not only outside of buildings but even within spaces or within buildings. So, our consciousness, how to move and how to occupy public space, has to change through that kind of knowledge that we now have.

That town hall was built in Ostfildern, Scharnhauser Park, which was an American military site (again somehow related to fear and protection). Nellingen Barracks was given up in 1992 and the city decided to build a whole new town on that former American military site. What do we do with a site completely non-public, basically protected from the public, now wanting to become super-attractive, creating a new community, creating an active life? And so, if the outside is quite, let’s say, a monolithic building that gives a certain weight to the center or gravity point to that new city, the interior is a very complex three dimensional labyrinth with focus on the public circulation area to celebrate the citizens instead of the administration. This is the meeting room. This is the wedding chamber. Basically, a whole world to discover within that wonder box of a civic center.





Another thing that we developed was also how to represent this idea of the virtual town hall that maybe exists more on the internet and in a data structure than as a real building. There is this question of how you attract people to come to that space if they don’t have to come. Because they have to extend their passport or they have to do their errands. So, if the town hall disappears into the virtual space, what expectations or what can the building do or what can architecture do to attract people back to that space? We have an x-ray wire frame model built or actually shot into this glass cube as a 3D-map, as a kind of a non-material representation of that virtual town hall. But the two things that I find important and that maybe are the most effective elements and that I call “activators” in our work are pitter.patterns, which is a rain produced by about 200 magnetic valves controlled by a software. We use the rainwater that is collected on the roof and have it kind of drop down in different patterns in front of the building. It is such a minor element in a way, but I should actually show a video with these sounds because it is visually less dramatic than acoustically. And as soon as it was working, it became, of course, an attraction. Kids would hang out there, they would play, it would become the cool hangout for the young, the teens. Old ladies would come with their dogs to walk. All of a sudden there was a moment or a reason to go somewhere or leave again. It only runs two hours a day now, unfortunately, but it was meant to be a kind of a new curtain wall facade to that building being in a way interactive or reacting to what is happening inside or the different climatic conditions. If there is a concert it would be more dramatic or if there is a special event it could affected by or interact with that event. We just made some proposals on how pitter.patterns, that artificial rain, would change and therefore also the acoustics of the plaza in front of the town hall would change.

The other elements are these poles that you see on the right. If the rain is nature animated by technology than these elements here are technology animated by nature because these hanging light wires with an optic that would project the light onto the floor would move with the wind. And so they would swing and the light point would also swing on the floor. The idea was to build in a web cam and we have 16 of these poles and a software, a regular software from supermarkets would collect all the 16 images and would bring them back onto the website of the city with this animated wind.light. The idea was also to anchor the real public space back into the virtual public space, which is maybe where the town hall gets more visited than the real building. All these things, how this new technology, new understandings of communication, new expectations of what a public space can do were brought together in this project in a very dense and compressed way. But what we learned from this was that there is an extreme curiosity and a hope and an acceptance or actually an embrace of a different kind of celebration of public space or communal space. And if it was in the beginning difficult to have the city board convinced that something extra actually would add to the city and they would profit from it, not only atmospherically, which I think is very important, but in the end it also becomes an economic factor because it just radiates and attracts more attention. A lot of what we discussed before seemed to have a fruitful resonance somehow.

Another project is the Mensa in Karlsruhe as a new center for three universities: the arts academy, the pedagogical school, and the technical university. The university closed down three small dining halls to create one larger one that is more economical in the long rum. At the same time, they were also hoping that different disciplines could mingle and the students would start to create a cross communication between the disciplines. And beyond being a special-looking building we also discovered a couple of new technologies. In this case, it is a wood building with a polyurethane coating.





Photos by David Franck


The largest project, which we are working on right now, is in Seville and called Metropol Parasol. It is located in the very center of the city and is maybe the easiest one in terms of attracting a certain communal experience or bringing people out onto the streets or into an urban experience. Here, this was a site for the food market. And when the competition started there was a hole because after starting the construction of an underground parking garage they found all these Roman ruins and everything was stopped. The city of Sevilla asked us to rethink that kind of window into the history of the city, to keep it as a work-in-progress archeology site or museum: to bring back food market functions, rethink the idea of what urban space is in the twenty-first century and how we can add a certain icon to the city again. This is part of the ambition all Spanish cities have right now, which started with Bilbao as the first one to show what an effect a building can have on a city. But I will stop here and Henry can continue.






HU

I would like to chart two moments in my development. The first part of my presentation will focus on about ten years of work that followed my graduate studies. In the mid 1990s, I was working towards a Ph.D. at Princeton and en route to becoming a scholar in history and theory of architecture. At the point where I needed to commit to my dissertation, I felt a pull towards something else, which was to open a gallery of architecture that would create a bridge between the worlds of contemporary art and architecture. It was largely motivated by my own sense of fear that the culture that had been supporting experimental architecture (at least in America) was dwindling. Sources of funding and programs dedicated to experimental work were vanishing as architecture began to regain commercial currency. I felt there was still plenty of work to be done and that architecture needed a space to try things out, a kind of public laboratory. I wondered if this might be attached to (and intervene in) the world of contemporary art, taking advantage of its systems and protocols to promote architecture as a quasi- or para-artistic form of conceptual research and critical inquiry.

In 2004, seven years after opening my gallery I did my first show of architectural drawings, Vanishing Points. Architectural Drawings by Hand, and included this 1917 drawing by Le Corbusier as well as works by Lebbeus Woods, Aldo Rossi, Peter Eisenman, and others. The reason I mention it first is that it took me many years to overcome my own anxiety of doing a show of architectural drawings in a gallery of architecture. I dealt with it by pairing this exhibition with an installation in the gallery’s project room.

Together these shows made an argument for architectural drawing as a form of conceptual research and not just visualization. And they were also meant to demonstrate—as I think, in one way or another all of the shows that I have been involved with do—what I call the projective impulse of architecture, which is to say that by comparison with artistic practices, which are largely interpretative, conceptual architecture is really a project of transformation. It aims to hypostasize new states of being, new kinds of situations, and new forms of participation.

We are now jumping back to 1997 where I managed to sneak my way into an art fair, the Gramercy Art Fair in the Gramercy Park Hotel; there, about 50 galleries were invited to take over individual hotel rooms. Most of the galleries treated the hotel rooms as bad galleries with imperfect walls and so on. Instead I saw the room as an already charged space and invited nine architects—some well known such as Bernard Tschumi and others not so known at the time such as Jürgen—to contribute a work that dealt with the hotel room itself. And so you see Diller + Scofidio’s His and Her Towels, Jürgen’s Lie sheets on the bed and his work on Euros attached to the windows.

After about a year and a half of staging interventions in art fairs—I did five in the course of 18 months—I was invited by Jeffrey Deitch to do a show in his gallery and worked with LOT-EK to present TV TANK. They took a 40-foot long petroleum trailer truck and sliced it into rings, each of which became an individual viewing lounge, a media environment where you could lie down and watch television. That project gave me some momentum and at that point I felt fearless enough to open my own gallery. My first show was Richard Barnes’ Unabomber photographs and nearly 50 projects followed before the gallery closed in 2005.

Here we have a collaborative project by Lebbeus Woods and Kiki Smith in the same space you just saw; it was typical of my shows in that the space became completely transformed with each project. And here is an installation by Freecell; they transformed the gallery one hot New York summer into a kind of garden. You stepped inside the greenhouse of suspended planes in a steel matrix covered in different kinds of moss over a floor that was made of shredded rubber; inside, the ground felt different, it was very damp and cool, and you could inhabit a kind of pure space of artificial nature.

Here is an installation by R&Sie, a project called Mosquito Bottleneck, which was a design for a house in the Caribbean. The idea of this house was that environmental threats, such as a huge mosquito population, could be incorporated into the building’s skin. This project connected with a parallel line of research and writing I began many years ago about ways that architecture organizes the relationship between inside and outside and, with that, between the pure and impure. We can see something of that again in this installation by An Te Liu where he stacked air purifiers into columns and created a kind of hypostyle hall. The air purifiers were all turned on; it was very noisy and the air was purified at an alarming rate. The piece offered a critical perspective on the modernist preoccupation with hygiene and the relationship of hygiene and interiority.

The complementary show to Jürgen’s In Heat, the last show in my gallery in 2005, was this one by Alex Schweder. This piece was called Lovesick Room and the idea was that the wallpaper emitted the smell of cake, which was delicious but also a little sickening. In the wall was a tiny monitor that showed the inside of someone’s’ body through an endoscope. Alex’s piece presented a deliberate confusion between inside and outside; this room got inside of you through smell. And that was paired with Jürgen’s In Heat, which offered something normally taboo, a gallery experience staged through touch.

There were a number of artists who showed with my gallery over the years; they all shared a certain courage insofar as they showed in a gallery called Henry Urbach Architecture. We would sometimes get calls from roofers and contractors who were hoping to do business with us. I think what joined the artists who were willing to go along on this ride with me was their interest in the gallery as a space for staging a parallel world—hypostasizing, as architects do, an alternative arrangement. So, here we have a piece by E.V. Day called Transporter. E.V.’s work deals with women’s bodies and tries to posit a state of a kind of unleashing where a more internal sense of autonomy and pleasure actually bursts out very often in very violent ways. Here is a silver sequin dress, shredded and held in a state of suspension as if being beamed up in Star Trek. And here is another show by E.V. called Galaxy, where mutant creatures fly through the gallery. Or Marsha Cottrell’s drawings; these are landscapes but also galaxies made of marks that begin in word processing programs. They are quite dazzling, even blinding, in their complexity. Or here Larry Mantello’s installation: thousands of icons of American pop culture reorganized in a way that reveals their political, sexual, and racial undertones; it is a work that one viewer, I think wisely, called Al Qaeda’s worst nightmare.

Now we’ll move to my work at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. I had reached a point where my gallery and its situation came into a kind of tension. The New York art scene, as many of you know, has become increasingly commercial and is now reaching a kind of fever pitch; in this context my gallery became increasingly unsustainable. And in order to grow in the way that I was hoping, it would have required a kind of not only investment but also a shift in the whole logic of the gallery towards something much less experimental.

I believed that I would have a chance to explore curatorial practice more deeply in the context of a museum and picked myself up and moved to San Francisco a year ago. And the first show that I did there was actually a project that I inherited but did my best to change. The idea was a very modest show of design objects from the collection by graduates from California College of Arts, which is a local art and design school. I was concerned that … we faced certain problems in exhibition design and architecture, first of all with architecture. Typically, you are showing something other than what the person is making, you are showing something that is not there. And with design objects you are showing things that are often too familiar in a different context. And each of these conditions really sets up certain limits and possibilities for a curator. So, I invited architect Douglas Burnham to stage these objects and he proposed a kind of ark. The idea was to imbed vitrines in a solid box such that each would hold an object and allow you to see past it into an interior space that was emblematic of school as a collective environment and also quite wonderful to see. Here, you have a sense of it; it was a kind of kaleidoscopic space in which objects became doubled and redoubled and seen through each other.

Then I thought I would give you a sense—because I am not only responsible for exhibitions but also for developing our permanent collection—of some of the works I have been buying; I think they also recapitulate the themes we have been discussing. Here on the left, we have the Boston bike by Biomega, a bike that incorporates risk, the threat of the urban environment, into its own design through a cable that, if cut, destroys the structural stability of the bike. And here is Tobias Wong’s Coke Spoon 2, a re-appropriation of a McDonald’s coffee spoon from the 1980s which was itself appropriated by drug users; it kept turning up as evidence in court trials, so McDonald’s pulled it and, two decades later, forced Wong to cease and desist production. Here are two photographs, on the left a photograph by Richard Barnes of the annual starling migration outside of Rome: an erosion of the sky that clearly evokes a sense of menace; and on the right, one of the works by Mauro Restiffe, a photograph of the monumental axis in Brasilia taken over by a vast crowd on the occasion of President Lula’s inauguration. So again, a kind of space is being undone. On the left photograph by Olivo Barbieri, who photographs urban sites from a helicopter using a camera with a tilt-focus lens that shifts scale radically within the image. Or this work by Peter Wegner, which shows Manhattan streetscapes inverted at 180 degrees. A different kind of disorientation is captured in Ron Arad's 1992 At Your Own Risk chair, a rocking chair filled with lead; the idea is you sit in it and when you get up it smacks you in the back.

And finally, the project now on view until the middle of January in our galleries, Your Mobile Expectations, by Olafur Eliasson, also known as the ice car. Here, a glimpse through the window of the freezer in which it is housed. This is a project that Eliasson did with BMW as part of their art car program which has been going on for about 30 years. Eliasson removed the shell from BMW’s hydrogen-powered race car and replaced it with a new skin with steel and ice. I am interested in this project for a number of reasons, especially as it creates a kind of architectural or atmospheric condition in the galleries. You arrive, you get a blanket and enter a freezer; inside it is about -10 degree Celsius, which is really a shock in San Francisco, where people often arrive at the museum wearing short pants and sandals. And then, with about 20 other people, you have this experience of being in a very strange bright cold space, a space at odds with the moderate, controlled atmosphere of the museum. And here is a detail: the process of icing the car on-site. Finally, an installation on the side walls with photographs of holes in the glacier, the Vatnajökull glacier in southern Iceland, which is Europe’s largest glacier. These holes are naturally occurring but also accelerating with climate change across the northern regions. I think these also offer a nice emblem for the aporia we face and form as we do our work.


Questions & Answers

Why do people fear good architecture, not as much as museums? I am really still a bit depressed about the point that most of the spaces people live in are very mediocre, and it is strange. And I think probably one idea could be, as you pointed out, by having public spaces be of a superior quality, people might be attracted to just better, quality-wise better space. Do you have a few words on that?

HU: It depends on what you mean by “good” and “quality.” I think people really appreciate quality in design, good craft and spaciousness and so on. And I think, fortunately, those traditions are quite alive in much of Europe and Japan and in certain parts of the world. But I think what we are thinking about more is not so much good architecture as much as challenging architecture, an architecture that imbeds itself as social and political critique.

JMH: I would also say that it depends very much on what is the understanding of our future and if this future has a certain positive or threatening aspect. Just as a very minor example: when I was young I had the feeling that the generation of our parents at least in this area of Germany, they all built really nice modern houses, they had these landscapes inside with fire places and a pool, quite modern and, in a way, innovative. If you look at what is built now it is very conservative, mostly conventional, but in a way it is a certain fear of loss of value. These things might be more easily sold later on, they might treat home and security in a different way that I think reflects what our understanding of future insecurity might be. And nowadays, for young architects, it is mostly clubs, lounges, maybe bars, restaurants or fair stands where we can experiment or do interesting things, mostly related to a very economic issue, because there is a certain event character built in a certain experimentation and doing something new. That completely shifted away from the single-family house towards different things like fair stands, stores, and restaurants. Since there is a lot of money involved, it also means that you have to feel comfortable with what you do with the money as a company, as a family, as a single person. It is a very difficult question for us. Then you see cultural differences. In Spain there is a huge interest in exploring and having something new, kind of updating the country to the twenty-first century. In Germany we are obsessed with rebuilding our castles. So I think, it is very culturally specific what is defined as “good” or where the risks or the potentials are happening.


Do you think there is a cultural difference in the desire and need of security? For instance, that you have in different countries or societies, different norms that frame architecture. ln Germany there is a very long tradition of being very obsessive with specific norms and structures that architecture has to fulfill in a very specific form. The shape and sizes of buildings are extremely regulated by the state and by the cities. Do you think there is a difference from other societies or cultures and how would you explain that? Do you think there is a specific connection not only to the desire to create a very cozy house and a very beautiful city? And, furthermore, do you also see a specific connection to the feelings towards security and safety?

JMH: I think that you could talk about the American market in a second, like gated communities. There is, of course, a big difference in different cultures. If you look at Japan, there is a quite big freedom in how you build within the city and this randomness or this chaotic structure is considered as normal because you are focusing on something else. Of course, Berlin is different and has other regulations that have been quite strict in the last years. That might change now. But I guess, that gives you either an opportunity or drives you away to other sites and countries to work. But then think about this in the US, it is even harder to have a possibility to do something different.

HU:What I find in Germany and much of Europe is that there is a kind of very dense public realm; it has a very particular atmosphere and a literal even spatial thickness as, for example, the edge between buildings and street is often very alive and inhabited. In America we have, I think, much more anxiety about public space, whether it is because it is a nation of immigrants and there was never the same sense of collective experience or because of the rise of the suburb and automobile culture and, later, the sense of threat the Americans imagine. So we see more and more attention towards private experience which, paradoxically, brings people back into the public realm of the internet in a certain way, but that is a different kind of space again.


I have a question for Henry concerning your shift from the gallery to the museum. And I thought it was quite amazing to hear it. Of course, the context in New York has changed but one would expect that the capacity or the interest to take a sort of a risk as a collector or buyer in the market of architecture would be higher than in the museum. Now you say that it is not the case.

HU: The jury is out. I am experimenting also with how can one operate in the museum with its slowness and bureaucracy. Nonetheless there is a dedicated space for work to take place. I think it is worth pursuing and it also allows a different depth of engagement with publications, for example, and public programs. A commercial gallery, on the other hand, has to be concerned with the bottom line and making sales.

JMH: It is also interesting that here we hardly have a museum that takes architecture or design as part of an all-inclusive cultural collection, it is mostly separated from an art museum. You want to see a Monet show, but then you might see a puzzling architectural object or a drawing. And I think there is a different understanding of cross-referencing, certain questions and concerns from one media to the other, from photography to video to sculpture to architecture to design.


Jürgen, I have a question for you: one of the things I have found fascinating about your work is, in some of the projects, this treatment of surface that becomes almost camouflage or decoration as punishment, which I found really compelling. And I wonder if you could speak a little bit more regarding when you went to study in the United Sates and you described a different sort of academic environment with different challenges and particularly how the greater culture formed the way that you are working or thinking about your work. Could you talk more about that?

JMH: I might have been interested in certain issues of patterns beforehand, or not ornaments, but geometry as a principle to deal with. But without any context; there was always a fascination with that. And I think it was helpful in the theory classes in architecture school, like Semper’s textile theory, or Mark Wigley’s book on the white wall. I think it was a moment where the surface was quite strongly discussed. But it was quite limited to a specific modernistic architectural language and I was very uncomfortable with that. It seemed like there was a kind of clear visual rhetoric. I felt I had to leave that context of New York to add something that became more my work or have a different take on that discussion and move it to somewhere else—a more complex understanding of architecture in an atmospheric sensorial way.

HU: I think that there was a critique of the modernist project that was taking place then and an effort to move as far as possible from postmodern historicism which, at that point, was not so old yet. In many domains of cultural theory people were moving towards radically subjective positions and trying to map their effects. I think queer studies had a lot to say to architectural theory because it was took on the body and erotic space and also the way that theories of performativity came to bear. And to go from that, you know, what people describe in Jürgen’s work as performative surfaces, that was a clear trajectory.


One element I liked very much was in Jürgen’s work the connection of these lights with the cameras and the way to make them visible in the virtual space, because this is a problem we have, to make visible structures of this virtual space for the user. So, are you spending more thoughts from an architectural perspective on what architecture can do to create greater visualization of structures in the virtual spaces we are creating and we are visiting?

JMH: I am not really a specialist in virtual reality. For the last five to six years, there is so much work done on questions of digital production, of representation, and of even the narrative coming into architecture. And parametric design is a big issue, how certain conditions can adapt easily if the program or the project changes. The digital does not only happen on the screen but also changes structure, production and construction.

 



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