With the Eyes of Architecture
An exhibition project

' Offenes Kulturhaus Offenes Kulturhaus

The power of architecture has waned. The modern age is no longer able to ask the central question; the postmodern age has never really taken the risk.

This project has assumed the task of introducing young architects who are attempting (outside the mainstream of an instrumentalized purposeful rationalism) to solve architectural problems without subjecting themselves to the actual implementation of architectural conventions, without replacing the concrete public sphere with an anonymous, hypothetical one. When the decision to proceed in this way is made, one chooses the difficult, complex path, which avoids assembly-line production and projects made for the drawer. This is perhaps the only way to recognize architecture within its contradictory and intricate content.

This project is intended to reflect on fundamental issues of architecture in a sensorial way by using unconventional perspectives. Shifted points of view illuminate society's relationship to aesthetic judgement. Architecture attempts to direct the attention towards the opposite side as a means of transportation, as an opportunity, and formulate replies.

Five artists/architects demonstrate the access doors leading to changed viewpoints of architecture and its principles. The important issue is not architecture as a constructed ambience, but the structuring of the architectural eye in a medialized world.

Participants:

ADOLPH-HERBERT KELZ / BRIGITTE LÖCKER
As architecture has always called attention to the embodiment of thought, the "Denklaboratorium" ("Think Laboratory") project intends to create a field of events capable of projecting a world in a manner similar to a continuum of events, a total reflective structure of influences which is associatively and concretely analogous to concepts from literature or film in its total density of action and in its architectural morphology.

PRINZGAU / PODGORSCHEK
"x-house or shrine for the goddess of in between", Chicago 1993
If art is an organism, like a kind of hermaphrodite, then one kind of art or the other is the ear, the testicle, the cerebellum, the armpit hair, the blood, the excrement, the melanin, the eye, the liver, the rage … (pod 91)

WOLFGANG TSCHAPELLER
"A gain in depth of focus means a loss of illumination. The objective (1) is always an agreement, a kind of contract of alternating silence between the ensuing illumination and sharpness of vision. If I attempt to see very clearly, everything becomes dark, and precisely to the extent that seeing itself becomes obscure (2) and that which is to be looked at is no longer visible.

The blind spot refers to the area in the eye that does not deliver visual information. The roving glance allows the blind spot to sweep across the environment as a censor's stroke (3) (reflective). Invisible rays that scan the environment are emitted from the eye. These rays look like needles (cf.: knitting needles) or legs. Whatever they touch disappears. The body's legs are needles. Seeing is deleting. What is read is eaten (read is deleted). The grounds are white. What is read is white.'" (1) see collective court of arbitration, (2) darkens, (3) sleeping place (reflective)