LIVING

Frontiers of Architecture III & IV

Date: 1 June - 2 October 2011
Venue: Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebæk, Denmark

Wilfried van Winden, WAM architecten: Inntel Hotels Amsterdam-Zaan-dam. © design: Mole-naar & Van Winden architecten / WAM architecten. Photo: Roel Backaert

Living can be about fulfilling dreams. Changes in the structures of society – growing numbers of people living singly, migration, different working norms, new forms of communication and the individualization of the idea of the Good Life all affect views of living. What does it mean to live – has it to do with a special place, a special lifestyle, a mantra, a philosophy or the sense of belonging with other people?

Louisiana’s architectural exhibition LIVING – the last in the series Frontiers of Architecture – investigates the concept of home and new modes of life through architectural and sociocultural looks at the world today. The coupling of architecture with humanist disciplines like anthropology and sociology provides the undercurrent of the exhibition – the expansion of our ideas about what architecture is and where its frontiers lie. The exhibition consists of a crossover between architectural projects, art installations and insights into current case stories from various places in the world where social development has created new modes of living.

The exhibition should be seen as interdisciplinary investigations across the fields of anthropology / sociology, art and architecture. Through spot-checks on various countries, regimes, networks and cultures the exhibition will focus sharply on new, alternative ways of expressing life modes through dwellings: what dreams are fulfilled and how? It looks at religion and types of collectivity as well as politics, migration, new visual worlds and everyday life.

It is the goal of the exhibition to show how this diversity of life modes is expressed through architecture as the essential framework of everyday life; through new human relations across geographical and national boundaries; through new and alternative shared interests; through celebration and events where the architecture is temporary and is regarded as a quite personal statement – from singles to collectives, from Romas to the nouveaux riches.

In an extensive look through an anthropological lens, Living presents a crossover between architectural projects and art installations. Glimpses of a number of current ‘case stories’ from a wide variety of places

Arne Quinze Uchronia, Burning Man Festival, 2006. Photo: © Thierry Van Dort

in the world show how social development all over the world is creating a diversity of ways of living, communicating and dwelling, and how the many tendencies are reflected in the home. Architects are challenged to present ideas for an architecture that relates to shared human ideas of the individual and the social network.

The anthropological layer in the exhibition is expressed through proposals for how human relations across geographical and national boundaries create alternative collective interests – from the ‘single’ life to collectives, from the Roma to the nouveau riche.

The exhibition looks at a cross-section of a wide field where an extract, a compressed picture of the world right now, appears in a kaleidoscopic pattern. Film, video, photography, drawings, models and installations visualize this diversity, commented on in depth in interviews with artists and architects. Separate large installations form part of the themes of the exhibition, each of which is rounded off with a ‘case story’.

Themes
Living has three overarching themes: The Dream, Cell/Network and Homeland.

The Dream, which forms a transition to the other two themes, is related to the child’s first experience of architecture, and the architecture in this section points to a return to the childlike perception of the home as a concentration of the most elementary needs. At the same time, for the architects of today it is a laboratory for the minimal dwelling unit. The theme is introduced with a presentation of the annual festival Burning Man, where all kinds of people meet to live – and to live out dreams – for a brief period.

The theme Cell/Network deals with the way the individual today links up with other people, how ways of dwelling and living reflect the individual and the many complex social contexts in which we humans are involved. This theme includes Behaviorology – a concept that expresses what the users want from the architects, and how the architects translate human behaviour into homes.

The last theme, Homeland, works with the two concepts housing and homing. Living distinguishes between the house and the home, such that the house means the physical dwelling, while the home applies to the habits, rituals and patterns in our lifestyle that make our dwelling into a home. In addition the exhibition touches on the subjects of migration and cultural fusion under the heading At Home Anywhere.

Installations especially created for the Louisiana
Four large installations included in the exhibition have been designed specifically for Living, and each in its own way embodies the themes of the exhibition. As an introduction the Belgian artist Arne Quinze has created an outdoor installation, My Home My House My Stilt House, a metaphor for the exhibition which on the one hand involves the central anthropological concepts of the exhibition and on the other reflects the first theme, The Dream.

The famous Japanese architect Sou Fujimoto exemplifies his visions of Cell/Network in three specific Louisiana installations: Louisiana Tower, Louisiana Cloud and Louisiana Glass Forest. Sou Fujimoto primarily experiments with new communication strategies related to new types of housing structures. The architect distinguishes between nest and cave, applied respectively to defined, functionally determined architecture and open, rough architecture where the place challenges human beings to investigate and appropriate the setting through their own creativity.

With their new multi-storey building in Manhattan in New York, West 57 (in progress), the Danish Bjarke Ingels Group (BIG) presents its proposal for new ways of linking dwelling with people. West 57 can be described as a hybrid between the European tenement block and the traditional skyscraper. Several other projects from the Danish architects are included in the exhibition.

In a specifically Nordic idiom using the four elements earth, fire, water and air, the architectural office Rintala Eggertsson Architects has created the installation Wish you were here?, which examines the issues involved in staging a ‘home’ as well as a cultural identity and the feeling of ‘home’.

Cases: Russia, the Roma, India
Three ‘case stories’ in Living round off the individual themes. They dip into the current projects that relate to special places where social or political factors create a basis for ways of thinking about home and architecture, and which have been selected against the background of their very different and realistic relationships with the concept of ‘living’.

Case I: ‘Russia – from collectivism to individualism’ has been curated by Bart Goldhoorn and is about the multi-storey building as the preferred dwelling type from the Stalinist period until today and the architectural consequences for construction in Russia and ‘mass housing’ as a concept in the world in general.

Case II: ‘Roma – architecture and identity’ deals with the Roma people and their highly varied living conditions, and how they express their cultural identity and status by building ‘clan palaces’ in Romania and Moldova. The Roma section has been curated by T.A.M.A., Gabi Scardi and Maria Papadimitriou.

Case III: ‘India’ – presents Cybermohalla Hub, an installation by Hirsch & Müller- Nikolaus Hirsch and Michel Müller. Cybermohalla Hub constitutes a digital laboratory – an organically growing institution that supplies alternative practices to a housing area by functioning as a cultural centre, school, studio and gallery. The exhibition shows the process that the drawing office initiated after the forced relocation of a neighbourhood in New Delhi. At the Louisiana, the exhibition links up with the process through a workshop that will result in a book project.

Exhibition catalogue
The exhibition catalogue Frontiers of Architecture III-IV – Living includes a preface by the director of the Louisiana Museum, Poul Erik Tøjner, and the curator of the exhibition, Kjeld Kjeldsen, as well as the articles “An exclamation mark that tells me I exist – an anthropological introduction to living” by Mark Vacher, “Cell Block, Egospheres, Self-containers” by Peter Sloterdijk, “Pollen Architecture and Pollen Cities” by Yann Moulier Boutang, as well as “Archipelagos and Pavilions” by Joseph Grima. It also features the poem “Living” by Morten Søndergaard and brief introductory texts to themes and presentations of works in the exhibition.

Further Information:
Louisiana Museum of Modern Art
Gl. Strandvej 13
3050 Humlebæk
Denmark
Tel.: +45 (0)4919 0791
eMail: mail@louisiana.dk
web: www.louisiana.dk