amid.cero9: VAULTS BEDS GARDENS: Public Hedonics and Alternative Publicness

VAULTS BEDS GARDENS: Public Hedonics and Alternative Publicness presents amid.cero9’s investigations on the role of architecture in the formation of the contemporary public realm. Through large format drawings and precious models recreating the working environment of their studio in Madrid, the exhibition presents architectural projects ranging from the beginning of their practice in 1998 to their most recent work.

Amidst the ruins of Western public space and the growing contemporary collective anesthesia, amid.cero9’s projects propose, in a playful and subversive way, a series of public artifacts whose ambition is to shape, through architecture, the place and the nature of human interactions, reformulating what public space can be nowadays. Communal beds, processions of portable gardens, vaults covering public interiors, gardens that recreate the concept of third natures, assemblages of machines for public demolition processes, outdoor gardens as communal houses, spaces for interaction with digital art or infra-light domes that celebrate the counter-routine are some of the subjects that the exhibition presents with a festal and positive commitment and intellectual ambition, reflecting amid.cero9’s aim to reconnect the practice of architecture with the complexity, richness, and overabundance of reality.

In VAULTS BEDS GARDENS: Public Hedonics and Alternative Publicness, amid.cero9 proposes an array of catalysts for alternative forms of publicness. The interiorization of public space, the displacements from the domestic sphere to the public, complex environments based on interaction with other species, the reinvention of public rituals, or the rediscovery of intimacy and pleasure in public try to respond and counteract the current banalization, commercialization, and forms of control of public space.

This collection of structural forms, contemporary rituals, immersive spaces, and gardens as collective constructs explains amid.cero9’s interest in the architectural project as a form of knowledge and discovery. The projects presented aim to propose alternative forms of beauty that would trigger new forms of affiliation and affection among individuals: an attempt to reformulate a new public sphere through architecture where physical interaction and the construction of the realm of collective beliefs, affections, and hopes can still happen.