The Graz Museum is hosting a festival exhibition entitled The City as Data Field. How we want to live in the future. It raises the question of how individuals and society are doing with global networking, “Big Data” and “navigating through data”. “First we make the data, then they make us” – what possibilities of “humanization” (Flusser) does technology open up, what do we need to pay attention to? The exhibition runs until 29th August 2021 and is one of the larger projects of the extended cultural year 2020 and belongs to the thematic focus “Digital Living Worlds”.
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The narrative of The City as a Data Field. How We Want to Live in the Future follows images proposed by the philosopher of technology Vilém Flusser and his plea for moving towards “designing fate” and venturing utopia as a playful testing of alternative possibilities of a “decent” life in response to the crisis. According to Flusser, the “we” to be reconfigured could be “no longer subject to values, but composes them instead.”
The City as a Data Field: The ubiquity of data control in public and private products and services
Flusser’s visionary background provides the stage for addressing the conflict between efficiency and optimisation versus personal and collective freedom of choice. The City as a Data Field. How We Want to Live in the Future is about the advance of data-driven automatic control into more and more intimate personal spheres of life. Whether “smart city”, “smart home”, choice of partner and family planning, body implant or child rearing – the ubiquity of data control in public and private products and services in the post-digital age of Industry 4.0 demands a reflection on the goals that guide us.
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Three performative formats that invite repeated active participation
- Festival and interactive exhibition in ten themed rooms on the ground floor and 2nd floor of the Graz Museum—with high-level international artworks, historical technical objects and themed installations.
- Ten-week discourse festival on the themes of the exhibition spaces, partly in the Graz Museum and Graz Museum Schlossberg as well as at striking cultural locations with lectures on the individual themes and participation by Graz-based initiatives.
- Thematic tours on changing focal points such as data economy, privacy, security and much more.
- Accompanying and in-depth discursive web format that also assumes the function of a catalogue that will perpetuate the exhibition.
Festival exhibition with different dimensions
- dynamic, not static; it responds to visitors and changes over time. A performative exhibition in which the contradictory nature of the creative forces and the open-endedness of the development of technology are introduced (not resolved).
- metaphorical, a “stage play in ten images”; it begins with Peter Weibel’s and Christian Lölkes’ eponymous work “The World as s Field of Data”, in which one no longer navigates by the stars but by data, and ends where one is as close to the stars as nowhere else in Graz: on the Schlossberg, near Richard Kriesche’s ARTSAT disc with a workshop to release a manifesto: “How We Want to Live in the Future”.
- contradictory; it leads us into contradictions and experiences, into feelings about the world, but it never radiates powerlessness or dystopia, but confidence; it is about decent living without giving concrete directions. The question is not how I want to live but how we want to live.
- participatory; the festival format invites active participation.
For more information click here.
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Curators: Peter Rantaša, Otto Hochreiter
Exhibition design and graphic design: BUERO41A
Exhibition design ground floor: studio-itzo
Project controlling: Sibylle Dienesch
Project management: Johanna Fiedler, Angela Rossmann, Franziska Schurig
Text Credits: Graz Museum
Architecture is omnipresent in everyday life; it is encountered every day. Architecture creates the framework for how people live their lives, move around and interact with others. Often one looks at the facade, but does not know the story behind it. From April 21 to October 3, 2021, the exhibition “Backstage” at the Danish Architecture Center shows which processes, steps, tools and ideas are behind the facades that surround us every day.
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The Danes have an innate belief that they can always do things a little better, and that rubs off on Danish architecture. What’s at stake when we build the walls we all live within? What forces drive the development, what mistakes do we make along the way, and how do we rectify them?
The backstage of architecture
This exhibition encourages its visitors to look “behind the facade” of the architecture that surrounds us. It touches upon issues that engage neighborhoods and communities, but that also divide them.
The exhibition focuses on central dilemmas of Danish architecture, but which affect most cities and communities around the world: Can we (still) afford to live in the city? How do we protect biodiversity? Is urban space primarily for the young? Is there any room for the vulnerable homeless? Are cities equipped to deal with climate change?
Moreover, another component of “looking behind the facade” are the tools that (Danish) architects, designers and urban planners use to shape the environment. Architecture does not start with the construction of an object, but much earlier. It is a long process. Therefore, the exhibition offers insights into the process of creating architecture and shows what thoughts are in the facades and what has remained of the ideas in the end, i.e. which ones have really been realized.
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Who rewrites the architectural rules of play?
The exhibition takes the form of a theater stage with various backdrops, scenes and stories that can be viewed independently of each other, but which together make up a whole story.
Visitors are guided through five sets, each of which addresses a specific topic. Here the visitors meet award-winning Danish architectural firms and architects such as Jørn Utzon, Dorthe Mandrup, Bjarke Ingels and Jan Gehl, each of whom has helped rewrite the architectural rules of play.
Through showcases, photographs, 1:1 installations, architectural models, films and interactive elements, Backstage shows what distinguishes Danish architecture, what it means to people in their everyday lives, and asks how each individual can influence and shape their environment.
Architecture from the perspective of art
To provide perspective on the exhibition’s overriding theme, the internationally renowned visual artist John Kørner was invited to give his take on how architecture impacts us.
In his graphic series Understanding the Impact of Architecture (2014–2020), Kørner zooms in on architecture and its influence and impact. He does not offer solutions or answers, but instead presents the issues and invites us to reflect on them.
For more information click here.
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Another current exhibition by the Danish Architecture Museum is “Hello Denmark”. Read the article here.
Can GREEN in architecture improve the climate in cities, reduce heat build-up, reduce fine dust formation and increase people’s well-being? The exhibition “Greening the City” of the German Architecture Museum in Frankfurt (DAM) is dedicated to the advantages and challenges of urban greenery – especially greening houses and roofs in existing and new buildings. In addition to the scientific perspective, the exhibition also takes a look at the technical possibilities and practical issues.
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Things can’t get any greener. Or can they? The topic of Building Greening as a response to climate change (felt especially in cities) is more current than ever and has not become any less important during this pandemic – on the contrary. And yet, actually realized cases of green roofs or walls are slow to spring up, at least in this country. Or is there simply a lack of oversight? The DAM in Frankfurt has now made a virtue of necessity and has, in the run-up to its current exhibition “Simply Green – Greening the City”, invited Best Practice examples from near and far; a photograph and short explanation sufficed. The response of 120 entries before the opening of the exhibition was pleasing, so they say. Entries ranged from more traditional house walls with ivy and vines, to new urban farming examples with raised beds on the rooftop. There were submissions from both larger firms (Schneider-Schumacher, Sauerbruch-Hutton) and from tenant communities, who seem to be particularly active in this field.
Fresh wave of green innovation
The exhibition aims to encourage a fresh wave of green innovation, an ambition currently realized more by its handbook since the building’s closure due to Covid-19. The handbook appears to be practical, informative and argumentative. It approaches the topic with questions that are often posed by interested parties as well as readily by greening-sceptics: How beneficial to the environment is the greening of an individual building? What techniques of wall-based greening exist? Which plants are suitable? How does irrigation work in winter? What effect do green roofs have on the reduction of precipitation and noise levels? How can you calculate costs? Which permissions are needed?
In light of the positive conclusions about the values of building greening that one can come to after reading this handbook, the question remains: Why has so little of it been implemented in this country? A glance at the section of the handbook with real-life examples reveals how the majority really are located abroad: Singapore, the worldwide center for green buildings, is of course mentioned, as are Chinese metropolises as well as the almost historic prototypes by Stefano Boeri in Milan (Bosco verticale) and Edouard Francais in Paris (Flower Tower).
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Development is mostly focused on large cities
Further research unveiling examples from Australia, Canada, Japan, the Netherlands and the US only proves this point. The fact that development is mostly focused on large cities is no surprise, given the climatic effects within densely built-up areas. A hesitant yet apparent trend seems to be the combining of green buildings with new parks in their vicinity. This would presumably be desirable both climatically and socially.
It also becomes apparent how a small number of individual players, operating worldwide and making this topic their core brand, now set the tone: WOHA in Singapore, MVRDV from Rotterdam, Stefano Boeri in Milan, as well as Parisian firms Jean Novel, Vincent Callebaut and OXO Architectes. The German firm Ingenhoven Architects can also be added to this list. According to Nicole Pfoser, professor at the University of Nürtingen-Geislingen, the reasons for the comparably limited spread of this development in these parts are additional costs of producing and maintaining the greened facades, together with a lack of established inclusion in development plans.
A lack of showpieces to increase public confidence
A worldwide leader in this field, Singapore accelerates this development through a regulated Green Plot Ratio, a site coverage index for green spaces, which is specified in the development plans of the city state. Finally, Pfoser argues that there is a lack of showpieces to increase public confidence, especially with regard to public administrative buildings. In this regard too, it seems Germany is less cosmopolitan and innovative than it likes to think of itself as being.
Talk in context of the exhibition „Simply Green – Greening the City“ with Richard Hassell and Wong Mun Summ (WOHA, Singapore)
In any case, readers viewing the exhibition – or rather the handbook – will in future be able to better confront developers. And maybe architects will gain inspiration from those pages on which are shown the creative possibilities that building greening offers for the design of facades, as well as their immediate and wider surroundings.
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Exhibition „Simply Green – Greening the City“. DAM, Frankfurt, 23.01. – 11.07.2021
The exhibition is still closed because of the current hygiene measures due to the Corona pandemic, nevertheless it is possible to get the handbook or to use the digital offers.
Handbook: Hilde Strobl, Peter Cachola Schmal, Rudi Scheuermann Hg./Ed.: ‘Einfach Grün. Greening the City’. Frankfurt, 2021, ~300 pages.
