Living in Motion: Design and architecture for flexible Dwelling
15 May 2004 – 15 August 2004
Kunsthaus Graz am Landesmuseum Joanneum
T +43-316/8017-9213
presse@kunsthausgraz.at
www.kunsthausgraz.at
Kunsthaus Graz is marked by movement. Here architecture and form, both specific to the audience as well as miscellaneous exhibitions, represent the starting point. After the two exhibitions of Sol LeWitt’s installation Wall and Vera Lutter’s large-size photographs of various interiors and outdoor environments, both thematising and gauging space, an exhibition explicitly devoted to the subject of architectural mobility follows on the first floor (Space 01).
Living in motion is about the fascinating forms of the movable utilitarian object, flexible dwelling and the possibilities of mobility as such; and, as a unique overall exhibition, it offers an extensive outline of the most important developments and visions in the fields of architecture and design in the past as well as in the future. Located in the upper exhibition space, the exhibition, which has been shown in several museums in cities like Berlin, Dublin or Barcelona since early 2003, is going to take up a dialogue with both its visitors and the open and flexible building.
Flexibility, mobility and multifunctionalism have always incited formal and technical innovations. Furniture or buildings complying with these criteria have always been regarded as groundbreaking and modern. So one of the central preoccupations of Modernism, for instance, was to make the domestic environment more flexible via multifunctional furnishing or multipurpose rooms that merged into one another. Gerrit Rietveld’s “Haus Schroder” of 1924/25 with its multipurpose rooms and movable walls is one of the most significant examples for this. Though not only Gerrit Rietveld but also almost all great designers have dealt with this subject, from Frank Lloyd Wright and Mies van der Rohe, Charles and Ray Eames, Jean Prouve, Joe Colombo or Achile Castiglioni up to Rem Koolhas or Shigeru Ban.
Yet the pursuit of flexibility in dwelling has a long history that extends through the ages and spans a wide variety of cultures: early European stair ladders, North African tents or South American hammocks, they all bear ostensive witness to this. The exhibition presents spectacular objects, like a movable Japanese hearth from the second half of the 19th century, sleeping mats from Malaysia and the Southwest Pacific, an adjustable wall screen from China (ca. 1885) and many more.
Rapidly changing living conditions and technological advances in recent years have only reinforced the relevance of the subject. As boundaries between work and private life become increasingly blurred today and mobile and independent lifestyles gain in importance, we are looking more than ever for dwelling possibilities that are freed from fixed patterns and predetermined locations. So architects and designers have aimed to adapt our domestic environment to these new parameters. Shigeru Ban’s “Naked House” (2000) with its room units that can be wheeled outside, Steven Holl’s “Fukuoka Apartments” (1992) whose interior layout can be completely transformed by means of pivoting and folding partition walls, the rotating living module “Turn on Sushi” by awg AllesWirdGut (2000) or the transportable “NheW”-house of the group OpenOffice /COPENHAGEN OFFICE (2000) are important examples for this.
So the exhibition presents the subject of flexibility and mobility as a fascinating topic of everyday life of the past, the present and the future and thus it bridges the exhibition and the characteristic features of the Kunsthaus itself.
Image: ad Living in Motion, copyright zefa
