ARCH+ features 3: raumlaborberlin
Matthias Rick from raumlaborberlin talks about campaign as an architectural and urbanistic medium. The event was held in January 2011 in Meiré und Meiré's Cologne Factory.
raumlaborberlin is unlike almost any other architectural bureau in that it stands for a cross-genre and interdisciplinary approach to architecture and urban planning. raumlaborberlin is not an architectural bureau in the conventional sense, but instead an open group of associates who cooperate on a project-specific basis together with specialists from other professions to work on the design of pubic spaces and artistic installations.
raumlaborberlin about boundaries and ways of crossing them:

"Our work is about urban space and its potential. If we are to be able to recognize, understand and accelerate this, we have to come to grips with the subject of boundaries. Because it is only at the boundaries that the character of a city or a structure is truly portrayed. This applies not only to space as such but also to the way we understand our discipline. We work at the boundaries of architecture and urban planning. Only when I step over the boundaries can I discover what is new and what possibilities this might hold.

So we see our task not so much as one of seeking solutions, but instead of confronting them with the unaccustomed and the unknown, in order to discover and define the boundaries and of course at the same time to question them again."
Boundaries are continuously shifting. They disappear, new ones appear. We are living in an era in which our world view is increasingly fragmenting. Today, the periphery starts in our own living rooms. Accepted and familiar habits become blurred. Getting to grips with the unknown conceals an unimaginable risk. Opening up to the unknown means loss of security. But this is a risk worth taking. Because boundaries are not separators. Boundaries connect us!

To understand boundaries, we have to stay in motion."
To create the installation "Back Room – adults only", Mike Meiré transformed his Cologne factory into a back room affording only difficult access. The exhibition confronts the visitor with the bewildering notion that furniture could have its own life, a dark alter-ego that questions the supposed certainties of marketing and the design staples of the good, the beautiful and the true.
The recording effect was amplified by the art film "Sync" by Marco Brambilla, which consists of hundreds of porno footage scenes which the video artist has morphed to form a single raw and disturbing feature.
(photos: David von Becker)
© 2020 S. Siedle & Söhne OHG
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