Performative Materialism
The exhibition Performative Materialism is the Austrian contribution to the 5th Architecture Biennial 2003 in São Paulo. Curator Angelika Fitz, Vienna, presents a generation of young Austrian architects with positions of convincing independence. The exhibition is based on models and large-scale photos within a spatial installation consisting of video projections. In contemporary urbanistic practice, architecture's margin of maneuver is increasingly curtailed. Architecture is entrusted with designing individual urban markers, and also with the smooth administration of space. It finds itself incorporated into a general trend of ‘social engineering’ focused on controlling the urban sphere and ensuring that it ‘works’. What, then, can architecture contribute to the quality of the city? The positions of the architects Klaus Stattmann, the next ENTERprise and Wolfgang Tschapeller transcend conventional urbanistic and architectural strategies by means of local and fragmented practices. To them, the urban sphere emerges from polyphony and dense superimposition; it cannot always be controlled and planned, and is sometimes fraught with conflict. The projects presented rupture rigid social, economic and spatial divisions within cities and allow unplanned encounters and alliances. The architects achieve a shift in attention from strategies of spatial order and organization to contexts of actions and effects, to activities and events. The strength of this ‘performative turn’ lies in the way they interweave analytical and interventionist tactics with aesthetic tactics. The projects work on a policy of sensory experience which shifts habitual fields of experience within the city to recombine structures, masses, spaces and activities. Next to current urbanistic designs by Klaus Stattmann, the next ENTERprise and Wolfgang Tschapeller, reference projects demonstrate how the radicalism of conceptual and formal approaches can be translated into the complexity of construction. The structures present a challenge to the user, as interesting landscapes may do now and then, and at the same time, they offer individual spaces of retreat. Reformulated urban space can host many gestures alternately and simultaneously, and is transformed again and again by these gestures and activities – on the way to an urban public sphere which is precisely unforeseeable.
Angelika Fitz, curator
Opening speakers:
Kristin Feireiss, Berlin
Christian Prosl, Austrian Embassador
Angelika Fitz, Vienna
Many thanks for the generous support:
Austrian Chancellor's Office/Arts Department, Zumtobel Staff, Seko Bticino GmbH, Halotech, Doka Industrie GmbH.
Publication: Performative Materialism, ed. by Angelika Fitz, 128 pp, English/German, Triton Publisher, Vienna, 2003, ISBN 3-85486-181-8; € 27.- Review Copies: Triton Publisher: Phone: +43-1-5248785-0; Fax: -18, office@triton-verlag.com, http://triton-verlag.com
Klaus Stattmann was born in Carinthia in 1963; he studied architecture at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna; office for architecture and research in Vienna since 1993. www.splus.at Klaus Stattmann's Reefs produce a spatial and temporal enrichment of a city's correlations with its constitutive borders and edges, incisions and interruptions. No longer landscape, but not yet architecture, they resemble ‘hybrid creatures’ such as coral reefs with their biological identity situated somewhere between animal and plant. As ‘performative interspaces’, they expand the cultural/urban/natural landscapes as side-roads, junctions, clearings, shelters and squares. These intractable spatial structures cannot simply be consumed, but must be conquered and appropriated by the users. In the lavish ‘enhancement of circuitousness’ postulated by Stattmann, rigid concepts of spatial administration and control are thwarted. The spaces' capacity for being acted on changes continuously and is governed by the Accidental Code. Successions of users expand the constructions, add on and tear away. Potential conflicts are risked, not anticipated and defused. The Reefs bear the marks of conflicts and risky maneuvers – the word ‘risk’ originally hails from sailors' experience with reefs ("rischio" in Italian). The Reefs can extend in horizontal expansion, as in the project for the Danube Canal in Vienna, or in vertical stratification, as in the Accidental Tower in Dublin. Their ‘enhanced circuitousness’ at the level of spatialization is magnified at the temporal level by the productive integration of accident. "The spatial programs, washed up incidentally, are a contingent assemblage of performative interstructures, which are subject solely to the law of constant change." (K.S.) Until an accident, impossible to integrate, a mistake, washes individual parts away again. Urban projects: Accidental Tower, Dublin, 2003 Reef Vienna, 1998-2003 Reference projects: Kinsky House (with Ernst J. Fuchs), Lower Austria, under construction fluc II, bar and music club, Vienna, 2003 Rising Water, pneumatic water-wave and bar, Carinthia, 2003 Leisure House Lorrimer, California, 2002
Wolfgang Tschapeller was born in East Tyrol; he studied architecture at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna and at Cornell University, USA; lectures i.a. at Cornell University and at Inha University, Seoul; office in Vienna since 1993. Wolfgang Tschapeller uses the textures of the city, existing buildings or residual structures of buildings, for instance of reinforced concrete skeleton constructions of the 1960s, but also traffic routes, bridges or artificial deposits as three-dimensional building sites. "There is no ground in the city, we generally build on structures which are accidentally more or less flush with the surface. We could long be working with different tectonic systems, not with systems of foundation and load, but for instance with tectonics of contact and friction." (W.T.) When the city itself becomes the building site, the ‘landscape’ (or what is left of the illusion of landscape) and the ‘city’ take on each other's roles. Architecture mutates to become a second-generation form of settlement. Parts of buildings and programs are embedded in and expelled from existing structures. The hermetism of the structural configurations is invalidated, at the same time prying open the orders of economics and legislation. Local, fragmented building masses emerge which do not prescribe utilization, but challenge use. "It's what I call CATSCAN, when a cat prowls an apartment looking for the place which seems best suited for a noontime nap. Cats do not read spatial programs. " (W.T.) Like a "bowl of rice for unknown deities", for instance, Guest Room implants could appear in various buildings of the city, in banks, churches, public buildings, stores, office buildings. Guest Rooms would be a sort of spatial tax, visible added value in the shape of spatial abundance. Urban projects: Guest Rooms, Study of Urban Tissues, 2003 BVA, Study of Urban Tissues (with Michael Wallraff), Vienna, 1998-99 Reference projects: Bolzano, Bolzano, 2001-03 Abbey of Altenburg, Lower Austria, 2002 District Commissioners Office Murau (with Friedrich Schöffauer), Styria, 2002 Crematorium Linz 2, Linz, 1999
the next ENTERprise – architects Ernst J. Fuchs (born 1963) and Marie Therese Harnoncourt (born 1967) founded tnE in 2000 in Vienna. They are both graduates of the University of Applied Arts in Vienna, and have been working together since the early 1990s (until 1998 in collaboration with Florian Haydn as the Poor Boy's Enterprise).
www.thenextenterprise.at
the next ENTERprise - Generative Tactics In the urban interventions of the next ENTERprise (Ernst J. Fuchs, Marie-Therese Harnoncourt), temporal fields become building sites, temporal spaces are invested with changing visibility. As early as the beginning of the 1990s, Ernst J. Fuchs developed pre-digital versions of generative urban planning in his ‘datafields’, which have meanwhile been further evolved by tnE using digitally supported tactics. Their architectural equipment enhances the complexity both of the design process and of the built structures. They provoke the unforeseen, permit constructive and social shifts that cannot be planned. Intended, among other things, for the large-scale development of urban fallow lands, these evolutionary sculptures foil and expand the temporal and spatial strategies of conventional master plans. Expanding and contracting, the structures involve themselves, the architects and the users in stratified sequences of events. The potentialities of future configurations of buildings and variations of use are continually expanded. Their architecture seeks to enable users to act and interact. Their strategies turn against the standardization of ‘managed’ architecture and the lacking ambiguity of service architecture. With their ‘charged’ architectural sculptures, tnE generate fleeting and at the same time intense spatial presence. In their most radical formulations, these ephemeral architectural sculptures are in the end, after their generative journey through time, re-transformed into empty spaces of unknown potential. Urban projects: How to Start a City, 2003 Reference projects: House Zirl, Tyrol, 1997 Private Underground Pool, (with Florian Haydn), Vienna, 2001 Public Lakeside Baths Kaltern, Italy, 2002 Audio Lounge, Secession, Vienna, 2002
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