How do we want to live today and what artistic means can help us find productive approaches to do so? The interdisciplinary exhibition ‘What if …?’ in the ‘Neues Museum’ in Nuremberg, Germany, engages contemporary perspectives from art, architecture, and design in a dialog with references from the 1960s and 1970s. The exhibition runs until 20 September.
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What if …? takes up contemporary calls for new utopias for the 21st century and aims at initiating social discussions and visions of the future not by means of dystopian prophecies, but by promoting new modes of thinking via productive discourse. If one perceives utopia as a method of thinking, as an intellectual free space in which concepts for the future are tested while also critically reflecting the status quo, independent of what is currently realizable, it gains immediate significance for the present. As creative engines, art, architecture, and design can make a meaningful contribution to promoting such alternative models of thought and reassessing utopian qualities.
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State and City
What if …? presents over thirty artists and designers who investigate the potential of the utopian. In five chapters, the exhibition features photographs, films and videos, drawings, architectural models and objects, extensive or interactive installations. Central thematic complexes related to the utopian, such as state and city, bring together historical and current sources of inspiration for a new understanding.
How do we deal with nature and technologies?
Furthermore, the relationship between individual and social utopias as well as alternative perspectives on how we deal with nature and technologies are discussed. The power of imagination and the chances these visualizations offer for our discourses illustrate the relevance of art and design when it comes to developing new utopias.
The exhibition runs from 30 May 2020 to 20 September 2020. For more information click here.
Expedition 27 – this is what the landscape architecture office Studio Vulkan and its project partners, the architecture firm Hosoya Schaefer and screenwriter Plinio Bachmann, named their competition entry for the Swiss National Exhibition 2027. While their entry won, the intelligent and multi-layered concept was never implemented. A referendum stopped the project early on, and it was never even presented to the public. And yet, the utopian visions the planners developed could have provided a key impetus to viewing the landscape – especially the sprawl and the fragmented, highly emotionalized landscape in Switzerland – from new perspectives.
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National exhibitions in Switzerland are held at irregular intervals, parallel to international world exhibitions. Planning for Expo 2027 “Lebensraum” (habitat, living space) followed “National Defense” (1939), “Progress” (1964) and “Creativity” (2002). What remains of such exhibitions is little more than the memory of spectacular gestures. At the Expo 2000 in Hanover, Germany, the architecture firm MVRDV surprised Expo visitors of the Dutch pavilion with the idea of a stacked landscape. Heatherwick Studio’s British contribution at the Expo 2010 in Shanghai was a structure containing over 200,000 plant seeds in 60,000 optic fibres, greatly impressing visitors. Of all the Swiss national exhibitions, the Expo 2002 made an especially lasting impression. The architectural firm Diller Scofidio + Renfro attracted international attention with its temporary, artificial cloud “Blur Building” in Yverdon-les-Bains, as did the Parisian architecture office Ateliers Jean Nouvel with its sinking monolith in Murten. What unites all these exhibitions is the experimental character they have as role models that shift boundaries between disciplines, between art, architecture and landscape.
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The search for nature in the landscape
The question of living space, of how we deal with and preserve landscape, space and resources, has been part of Switzerland’s political and social discussions for years. The charming pictures of contented cows surrounded by alpine landscapes promoted by the tourism industry are only one side of the coin, and the appearance of this paradise is misleading. In the course of the twentieth century, the fragmented structure and the topography of Switzerland has undergone a structural change from an agrarian state to an intensive, almost industrial use of agricultural land in trying to provide the population with sufficient produce. It’s a paradox: while the consumption of land for settlements, infrastructure and usable space grows, people’s yearning for the natural impact of the landscape grows to an equal degree. There is talk of a “renaissance” of natural aesthetics, of the magic effect of a utopian image, all of which is brought forth without having to establish a connection to actual conditions on the ground. As a counterpart to the density of cities and the sprawl of agglomerations, unspoiled nature has become a healing alternative world, a lofty idyll that has little to do with normal, everyday life.
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The project idea: The landscape as a topic of discourse for a research trip
Expedition 27 focused on the vacuum between the landscape as a place of longing, and the excessive consumption of what seems to be a freely available object of use. The balancing act between utopian visions and pragmatic approaches to solutions served as a motor to see the magic of the landscape from a new perspective – from delightful to radical in its implementation. Instead of a temporary exhibition at fixed locations, i.e. a densification of issues at specially designed locations, the topic of the Expo itself became a theme and could thus be experienced on site. The planners divided the geographical space of the country into three large landscape bands, which on the one hand shape cultural identity, but are also part of an economic cycle: The mountain landscape with its rugged mountain world and green hills (“Where do we come from?”), the urban landscape with its agglomerations and agricultural areas (“Who are we?”) and the lakeside landscape, with the openness and internationality of Lake Constance’s shore areas (“Where do we go?”). The link between these bands is the layer of human existence, which paradigmatically tells of the past and the future, from the naturally archaic to the technologically civilised.
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The infrastructure of existing railway lines and their intersections links the exhibition areas to each other and ensures that expedition destinations can be easily reached and experienced. The railway wagons, however, are not only infrastructure, but as a rolling Expo, are also part of the landscape. A comprehensive narrative is superimposed over the various layers; a narrative fabric of old legends and traditions, contemporary myths and future stories. The narrative entity is achieved in the form of a “Writer’s Room”, whose “storytellers” track down themes, process them and guide visitors through a precise montage of the existing elements on a journey between fiction and reality. Here, the virtual and analogue world, reality and vision become blurred. Information available to everyone overlaps with individually or collectively shared, curated or random experiences. The directed gaze of the Expo is a magnifying glass for developing the landscape in a participatory way and collectively providing it with new stories.
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All image rights by Team Expedition 27.
Read the full article about the utopian project idea in topos 107.
The Renaissance has shown that creative, unconventional ideas and plans have arisen as a result of necessity. Leonardo da Vinci was one of those who developed ideas for the “ideal city” to solve urban problems of his era. In times of climate crisis, his sketches and ideas are still relevant today, as he designed urban concepts that are efficient and ecologically and socially sustainable. The unconventionality of da Vinci, who is celebrating his 500th anniversary this year, is more in demand than ever.
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The Renaissance is feted as a period of incredible progress in art and architecture, but we tend to forget that the 15th century also marked the birth of urbanism as a true discipline. For this reason, today more than ever, it may be useful to approach the heroic figures of 15th century architecture and urban planning to learn how they believed we could revolutionize the world for the better.
Leonardo Da Vinci is the quintessential Renaissance Man, not only for his polygraphic personality, talent and inexhaustible curiosity, but above all for having radically renewed the perspective of the world that surrounded him. Memorable pages have been written rebranding Leonardo’s science and art: his anatomical studies, flying and war machines have no comparable precedents, yet it has not been emphasized enough that Leonardo also invented some of the essential modern principles of urban planning, including biophilia, and he made extensive use of biomimetic tools in environmental design and planning.
Leonardo rethinks the design of medieval cities, with their winding and overcrowded streets and with houses piled against one another, and presents to us the foundation of a new city along the Ticino River, one with clean urban spaces and designed for the easy transport of goods. It is a modern and rational city, consistent with Renaissance ideals.
Unconventional design, Unconventional personality
Leonardo planned a comfortable and spacious city, with well-ordered streets and architecture, and recommended “high, strong walls”, with “towers and battlements of all necessary and pleasant beauty.” Furthermore, his city needed both “the sublimity and magnificence of a holy temple” and “the convenient composition of private homes”.
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What sets Leonardo’s city apart are his personal touches, flashes of his unconventional personality. Leonardo included several innovations in his urban design. He wanted the city to be built on different levels, linked with vertical staircases. Elegant palaces and wide streets would occupy the upper levels of the city, where people could walk undisturbed at their leisure. Services, trade, transport and industry on the other hand would be restricted to the lower level, tucked away from sight.
It is a design that is familiar to us from high-rise buildings, but was totally unconventional at the time. Indeed, his idea of maximising interior spaces by placing staircases on the outside of buildings didn’t find support until the Modernist movement, at the start of the twentieth century.
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The whole article about the “ideal city” of da Vinci can be found in topos 107.
In every print edition, topos publish a Big Picture that is particularly impressive because of its aesthetics and the message behind it. topos 107 is showing John Gerrard’s installation “Western Flag” in the desert of the Coachella Valley.
Destruction. Suffering. Death. These are the associations that come to mind when watching the art installation “Western Flag” by John Gerrard. Located in the desert of Coachella Valley, the staggering beauty of the surroundings doesn’t let spectators shake the uneasy feeling that creeps up their spine.
The installation consisting of an LED-wall instantaneously evokes negative emotions. It shows a digitally generated live stream of a flagpole that emits black smoke cumulating in a cloudy, black flag. The flag is situated at the “Lucas Gusher,” which is the site of the world’s first major oil find: the 1901 Spindletop. Over the course of nine days after its discovery, millions of liters of oil a day blew into the sky before it came under control. It marked the beginning of the petroleum age.
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Now, over a century later, we are struggling with the consequences of that golden era. With a change of state of matter from liquid to gas, Gerrard mirrors the oil find to draw attention and give visibility to the never-ending stream of carbon dioxide that is released into the atmosphere every day – and the fact that it is nowhere near under control.
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The Big Picture for the installation “Western Flag” can be found in topos 107.
