J. Mayer H., Berlin
In this exhibition, J. MAYER H. presents different approaches to thinking up to their implementation in reality. The constricting conventional definition of the discipline 'architecture' is radically broken open in his works. The interpenetration and juxtaposition of the most diverse media and scales is revealed here as a rich ground for a new approach to space. The simultaneity of different disciplines becomes a productive potential, from consulting and research to 'conventional' building activity. In the process, previously contradictory categories such as 'public-private', 'real-virtual' or 'inside-outside' are dissolved and re-evaluated. The surfaces of the architectures play an important role in this. They serve as a foil for different social phenomena. Transparent or massive, they are integrated into a temporal pattern of interaction that never allows for a single state, but always passes through different phases.
Ilka and Andreas Ruby write about the work of Jürgen Mayer H.: " This dissolution and relativisation of the surface in 20th century architecture forms the background for Jürgen Mayer H.'s work with surfaces. He is interested in what appears when surfaces disappear. ..... Just as in the transparent architecture of modernism the spatial content of the house expands beyond its façade and encompasses the outside space, so today the private leaves the confines of the body to inscribe itself in the everyday environment as a whole. ..... This temporal activation gives the surface in its relationship to architecture a new informational value that compensates for what it lacks in spatial depth through temporal duration. So the question is no longer how much space lies behind the surface, but how much time. Mayer H. projects the surface directly into the fourth dimension of time; the intervening third dimension of space is, as it were, skipped over, but in the process co-described in an indirect way."
The exhibition focuses on the recently completed townhouse in Scharnhauser Park in Ostfildern as well as Corridor, a case study in collaboration with the Stylepark office.