INSTITUT FÜR KUNST UND ARCHITEKTUR
ADP ANALOGUE DIGITAL PRODUCTION CMT CONSTRUCTION MATERIAL TECHNOLOGY
www.akbild.ac.at/ika
ESC ECOLOGY SUSTAINABILITY CULTURAL HERITAGE
INSTITUTE REVIEW FOR ART SUMMER AND 2019 ARCHITECTURE
ADP Wolfgang Tschapeller Werner Skvara Antonia Autischer Vincent Behrens Daniel Bracher Sidika Cupuroglu Alexander Czernin David Degasper Alice Hoffmann Tuvana Beliz Kankalli Ji Yun Lee Matthew Peate Emilia Piatkowska Lisa Prossegger Normunds Püne Moritz Schafschetzy Helena Schenavsky Julian Schönborn Salome Schramm Sebastian Seib Johanna Syré Matias Tapia Johannes Wiener Julia Wiesiollek Catherine Zesch Reviewers and guests Barbara Imhof Valerie Messini Walter Prenner Thomas Romm John Zissovici
How to live in an air handler. This sounds a bit like an instruction for use. And that’s intentional. It could also sound like a cynical remark about our technologydriven environment. That’s not the intention. The title is derived from a series of experiences of the atmosphere: again, perhaps some of them may sound like cynical remarks. But again: that’s not how they are meant. They are experiences that led me to think about air flows and breathing. They include the waiting rooms in the Nikola Tesla Airport in Belgrade, which give you the feeling that you have entered the antechamber of a turbine. Then there’s a childhood experiment: You breathe in deeply 20 times, then, from behind you, a second person suddenly compresses your chest. This results briefly in unconsciousness. Or diving. Surfacing is delayed, metre by metre, until you shoot upwards, open your mouth wide and gulp for air. Then, an installation by Carsten Höller in the Hayward Gallery in London that lets visitors feel their way through the twists and turns of a dreadfully long ventilation system. Or the technical ventilation concept for the Mui Ho Fine Arts Library in Cornell, which we1 designed: books and readers are placed in a slow, constant flow of fresh air in an open space. And Erik Olsen’s 2 tale about an attempt to construct a place with the purest air amidst the contami nated air of Peking. Air-handling systems have to do with breathing. For buildings air handling plants are like lungs. Buildings that are not cross ventilated perish, irrespective of whether they are naturally or mechanically
ventilated. How long can a human being survive without air? The record is said to be 20 minutes. I can only hold my breath for a maximum count of 60. How long can a building do without air? In relation to the capacities of their organs people have penetrated too far into the depths of buildings. For people air-handling plants are like external lungs, like technical extensions of the organic bronchia, exo-bronchia, so to speak. With the help of these exo-bronchia people can access and use buildings of greater depth. They help to bring the correct air mix to the blood and air barriers that form the alveoli or air sacs, where carbon dioxide and oxygen can pass freely between the inside of the body and an exterior space that has penetrated deep inside the body.3 How often do oxygen and carbon dioxide pass the triple-layer blood and air barriers that surround the alveolar space? Around 20 000 times daily, in and out. In the process around 12m³ of air are moved, a space, for example, that measures 2.4 metres in width, 2 metres in length and is 2.5 metres high, that is to say approximately the size of Le Corbusier’s Cabanon in Roquebrune, 365 times a year into and out of the body. What do we inhale? Simply the air, the gases and the pollutants that form the atmosphere that surround us. This is, theoretically, made up of 78% nitrogen, 21% oxygen, 1% inert gases such as helium, argon and then 0,04% carbon dioxide, methane and hydrogen. And what do we exhale? Roughly the same, but the proportion of oxygen to carbon dioxide is different. Of the 21% oxygen inhaled only 17% comes back, while the proportion of exhaled carbon dioxide rises to 4%, i.e. increases 100-fold. But don’t worry, breathe out calmly: the exhaled carbon dioxide does not increase the proportion of greenhouse gas in the environment, it is part of the carbon dioxide cycle. Are exo-bronchia and exo-organs comparable with an image that Reyner Banham attributes to Phillip Johnson? As the prototype for his Glass House in New Canaan Johnson insistently invoked the image of a burned-out township in New England in which the external walls were so completely consumed by fire that only the servant parts of the building, such as the brick floor slabs and the chimneys, were left. Or could the exposed veins and arteries of Armilla be read as exo-organs of this kind? Armilla, the city with no walls, no floors and no ceilings but only a mesh of water pipes into which people are woven? Or is it Buckminster Fuller´s “Standard-of-Living-Package“4, which breathes out warm air along the ground, broadcasts music and grills well-matured proteins under infra-red lighting? Phillip Johnson´s burned-out New England town, Calvino’s Armilla, Buckmister Fuller´s Standard-of-Living-Package and Dallegret´s designs all produce images of situations, places to stay and towns that do not consist of buildings and shells but of “organs” and “equipment”. These are positioned freely in the continuum of the atmosphere in order to produce local places with a certain consistency of atmosphere, places where we would like to stay, at least for a certain time, with all our friends. The alternative design comes from Constant. An alternative world that encircles the globe, a second earth’s surface
20 metres above the ground, completely detached from the atmosphere, with an artificial climate independent of the atmosphere, with independent lighting and creative games. Wolfgang Tschapeller Design Studio BArch2
→ fig. 4 / p. 7 → fig. 13 / pp. 10, 11 → fig. 27 / pp. 16, 17 → fig. 28 / p. 17 1 TWA 2 Eric Olsen, Transsolar N.Y. 3 Prometheus, Lernatlas der Anatomie, Stuttgart / New York 2009 and Wikipedia 191120-30 4 Reyner Banham, Francois Dallegret, A Home is not a House, 1965
HTC HISTORY THEORY CRITICISM GLC GEOGRAPHY LANDSCAPES CITIES
(…) // The traditional art object / be it painting, a sculpture / a piece of architecture / can no longer be seen as an isolated unit / but must be considered within the context of changes in time and space / moving physically and percepted visually / in all directions of environment / be it man-built or part of nature. / Thus we are stimulated constantly by split seconds / physically or emotionally with a world / already existent or in the making. / Object and environment remain / constantly one in unison with past and future. / Consequently the environment becomes / equally as important as the object / if not more so / because the object breathes with the surroundings / as we do. // No object of nature or of art can ever exist / or has ever existed without environment. / As a matter of fact / the object itself can expand to a degree / where it becomes its own environment. / (…) Frederick Kiesler, The Correalism of the Plastic Arts, 1960 6
RETHINKING KIESLER ESC Hannes Stiefel Luciano Parodi Veronika Behawetz Philipp Behawy Jakob Czinger Martin Eichler Yoko Gwen Halbwidl Oana-Alexandra Ionescu Alma Kelderer Dila Kirmizitoprak Martin Kohlberger Diana Konovalova Nils Frederik Neuböck Anna Orbanic Lisa Theresa Penz Zoe Jacqueline Pianaro Hannah Rade Fabian Schwarz Magdalena Stainer Carla Veltman Valeriia Malysh Reviewers and guests Kathrin Aste Edward Broeders David Gissen Valerie Messini Thomas Romm Karolin Schmidbaur Lisa Schmidt-Colinet Gerd Zillner John Zissovici
(…) / We are making the catastrophic error of / basing our wisdom on a past, its facts / questionable indeed, while in truth / the present is a marriage of the nuclei / of the bearers of the past and the / standards of the future, simply because / no future can evolve that has not its real roots / in the values of the past (no matter how far apast). / We work with myths of facts instead of / with facts of a myth. // Events and memory of events are / continually transformed by the present / to procreate the future. This is the / correalism of nature, and it is / a pluralistic genesis. And it is not / a monotheistic configuration but a unity / of a constantly changing diversity. // (…) Frederick Kiesler, The Correalism of Nature, 1960 5
Rethinking Kiesler is an ambitious endeavour, and it is complex purely in consideration of the vast range of his work in various fields: architecture, industrial design, the visual and performing arts, exhibition design, teaching, theoretical writing and literary reflection – the latter at times affecting disciplines of the natural sciences as well as metaphysical realms. The studio explored all of Frederick Kiesler’s documented projects in order to get an idea of the design culture that arose in interaction with his correalist theories. What is decisive for these theories are the interactions between the so-called human, natural and technological environments, as well as their understanding of reality – and of the forms in which reality visually presents itself – as the result of a constant battle for predominance between integrative and disintegrative forces. A contemporary reading of these writings enables us to recognize Kiesler as a staunch practitioner and missionary of ecological thinking – a form of ecologi cal thinking by design. The first rediscovery of Kiesler’s work (by architects) was a rediscovery through space. The second one could happen via the environment. It is surprising that the “environmentalist” Kiesler chose clearly defined boundaries for most of his “ecological case studies”. With his design proposals, he worked, generally speaking, in quite small scales, and his architectural models were presented in a way that would, in a first reading, almost unavoidably position them in the world of objects. And yet it is one of the insights of the studio that it is not implicitly a matter of the object, but rather of its impact on, and reciprocity with, its environments. Thus, to put it differently, it is a matter of the object and the form in which it presents itself, since it sets the orientation of the impacts and reciproc ities mentioned. The studio aimed to approach and test Kiesler’s correalist visions in various scales on random sites throughout the city of Vienna; to apply and pursue them by the design of architectural structures that, supported by hybrid programming, themselves install a series of ecologies that interact in many ways with their surroundings. This studio epitomized an ESC exploration that tacitly began some years ago, and needs to be continued – endlessly. Hannes Stiefel, Luciano Parodi
Kiesler’s concept of ‘endlessness’ was in essence an expression of the continu ity of every point and object in the world with what operates beyond it, in fields both proximate and remote. (…) The doctrine of Correalism projects a seamless ecological vortex that permits no essential division between worldly objects, their structural deployments, or the motives, habits and desires that brought them to be. Sanford Kwinter, Correalist Vision, 20157
THE GENERATOR OF THE HUMAN The Generator of the Human is an inter vention located in the 7th district of Vienna, a conglomeration of different systems: three greenhouses, a winery and an organ factory, triggering one another’s existence. The idea was an atmosphere so precisely planned that the technological environment – or in this case even the artificial environment – manages to overcome the limits of the human environment itself, making it possible to print human-like organs and skin tissues in a human health centre hosting people in need of transplants. The building follows the patient’s path of health, starting from the lowest point underground, where the winery is located. The patient works his way up through the organ factory to the third and last greenhouse, enjoying it as part of the rehabilitation area and phase. The healing process itself starts in the stem cell extraction room, where the patient’s cells are collected, while a personalized 3D print of the transplant made from hydrogel is developed and combined with the extracted cells inside incubators, simulating the perfect conditions of the human body. The skins of the organ-like rooms are made of reinforced foil with different transparencies and double membranes, divided into different sections. The overall construction is secured by a hanging system of tension ropes, strapping the inflatables to the structure of the existing Gründerzeit building that hosts them. Meanwhile, the largest greenhouse with a temperature of 8-12° is used for the cultivation of vines in capsules of hydrogel. By the use of gravity, the grapes are transported through tubes to the winery, where they are crushed, pressed and fermented for the extraction of alcohol and the production of medicine and narcotic gas, necessary for the operation. The fresh air produced by the greenhouses is also transported into the organ factory and used especially during surgeries. Alma Kelderer Design Studio BArch4
→ fig. 2, p. 5 → fig. 3, p. 6 → fig. 14 / pp. 10, 11 Special thanks to: Gerd Zillner, Austrian Frederick and Lillian Kiesler Private Foundation Vienna 5 Inside the Endless House – Art, People and Architecture: A Journal, by Frederick Kiesler, Simon and Schuster, New York 1964, p.144-145 6 Ibid., p. 151-152 7 Sanford Kwinter: Correalist Vision, in: Endless Kiesler, edited by Klaus Bollinger, Florian Medicus and the Austrian Frederick and Lillian Kiesler Private Foundation, Birkhäuser / Edition Angewandte, Basel 2015, p. 215-216 / 217