Kunst und Architektur I. Facts and Fiction
Donnerstag, 21. März 2019 - 19:00 Uhr
Akademie der bildenden Künste Wien
Die weiteren Termine: 16.5.2019, 23.5.2019 und 6.6.2019
1 Future environments of or for architectural education will be fictitious and performative, and yet they will not be capable of eluding Thomas Pynchon’s finding that “games, fairy-tales, legends from history, all the paraphernalia of make-believe can be adapted and even embodied in a physical place.” This might explain the ambiguous character of those manifold environments in which future architectural education will settle and perform – and somehow always did.
2 We are interested in the processing of reality – and in the transcription of other, of various, of fantastic realities into the architectural and the built realm.
3 Victor Hugo’s 19th century proclamation of the end of architecture refers to a debate about the hegemony in the field of cultural expression, a battle between architecture and printing, between the building and the book, stone and paper. Today, the relation between contemporary architecture and diverse forms of media is rather fluid and reciprocate than oppositional. We wanted to challenge this dynamic relation and we inscribed it into the fabric and space of the contemporary city in the form of an anticipating library of architecture.
4 We think about Jorge Luis Borges model of the universe, the library of Babel, and we recall Michel Foucault’s notes on Persian gardens and carpets – these smallest parcels of the world that simultaneously represent its totality. This endeavour is nothing short of ambition: imagine a future library as a liquid garden conceived with and represented through contemporary architectural means.
5 Sometimes “eternal truths” need to be cleared in order to confirm them in an alteredworld. We understand the task of Cultural Heritage as an influential transformative practice in contrast to a duty of conservation.
6 We affirm the call for a yet unknown change of paradigm in architectural practice and teaching, a call for an intensified investigation of other spaces and thus of concepts of diversity and difference. They stay for a desirable future of architecture into which some of yesterday’s exceptions have already cast their shadows.
Participants: Students from BArch4 ESC Design Studio 2016, Luciano Parodi and Hannes Stiefel