@IGmA 5: Cafeteria of Looking Good
The exhibition Cafeteria of Looking Good presents selected projects from the design studio of the same name, which was offered by the University of Looking Good (UoLG) of the IGmA in the winter semester 2019/20. The design location was the K1 college building of the University of Stuttgart in Keplerstraße. In seven days, the students researched the worst cafés in the world, which included the cafeteria currently existing in K1. During another seven days, the students developed various concept ideas for a new cafeteria, which were presented to an interdisciplinary jury of experts. The exhibition is intended as a contribution to the discussion on the planned redesign of the current cafeteria.
The project was realized in cooperation with the student council.
Thanks to Petra Bräutigam, Lena Engelfried, Vera Krimmer, Prof. Astrid Ley, Andreas Liebl, Laura Müller-Sixer, Prof. Sonja Nagel, Paul Benjamin Scheibe, Christian Schiller and Prof. Stephan Trüby.
@IGmA 4: Skin in the Game
In order to build, the architect has always operated beyond the realm of pure ‘construction’. She is always aware that what she creates is for a human with certain needs and desires, that she is placing this creation within a certain context, that this ‘act’ of building requires a sense of playfulness that goes beyond functionality. To achieve this, the architect looks to other professions, like history, philosophy, performing arts, linguistics, environmental studies, psychology, technology, literature, arts, anthropology, sociology, politics, archaeology, biology, physics etc. Having dipped her toe in any of these professions as and when required, she then possess the unique ability to weave a narrative and use it to design a building. Over the years, the need for the ‘building’ aspect of architecture has declined. The definition of architecture is now steeped in ambiguity and the profession has had to hit the ‘reset’ button. This ambiguity provides great opportunity and scope for active discovery. The unique skillset of the architect to hold knowledge across an array of professions facilitates a new and exciting way of ‘looking’ at architecture. Just by virtue of being in the profession today, we have ‘skin in the game’. We are driven as a community, directly involved in and affected by redefining what it means to be an architect. This means that it is time for each of us to take a stance and identify the purpose of the ‘architecture’ we want to practice. The seminar "Unsolicited Architecture" took us through a few practices that recognised a need and plunged into what they see as the function of an architect. This exhibition will take you through some ideas that we as students see as the future of architecture practices. The exhibition will constantly raise the question of “Through which other professional arena do you see yourself approaching your architecture practice? What purpose do you see it serving our present society?”
@IGmA 3: Architektur der Schönheit der Architektur / Architecture of Beauty of Architecture (UoLG-World´s Fair)
Long before Louis Sullivan's 1896 essay "The tall office building artistically considered", in which the famous phrase "form follows function" fell, had already at the University of Looking Good (UoLG) the rule "Form follows function follows beauty" been applied. Today, the topic of beauty is more relevant than ever - and seems to have become the main criteria for assessing architecture.
What does beauty mean in and for architecture? UoLGists approached this question in the framework of the project "Architecture of the Beauty of Architecture" in RGB, NTSC, PAL / SECAM video rooms, among others
Gen Foundation
Diamond Team
Malte Didrichkeit
Homo Illusionator
Laboratory for WTF
Anna Oechsle
to see and to experience are: pixelations, zoom levels (ins and outs) and embedded multi-dimensional camera shots on stained building structures, as well as multi-track soundtracks. Sullivan says: "As you are, so are your buildings." According to UoLG, it takes 18 minutes to internalize the exhibition.
@IGmA 2: Draußen in Teheran. Dialektik der Moderne in Iran / Out in Tehran. Dialectic of Modernity in Iran
On February 11, 2019, state ceremonies throughout Iran commemorate the 40th anniversary of the Islamic Revolution - and thus a massive upheaval of the entire social system from a monarchy to a theocracy, which can also be understood as a rejection of a top-down modernization of the country by the Shah according to European and American models. Since then, the search for a specifically Iranian modernity has been an ongoing process. The same is true for its architecture.
The spatial installation* follows the idea of a "Camp of Faith" by the Iranian architectural theorist Hamed Khosravi, who recognizes in the principles of the Islamic city a spatial response to the neoliberal rhetoric of flexibility and indeterminacy in modern architecture and urban planning.[1] According to Khosravi, the meta-architecture of an inhabited wall is the origin of numerous spatial typologies in and beyond Iran.
For example, the Islamic city - the Medina as the Unity of Law, Politics and Religion - was formed from the religious communities of the Umma, which was separated from the Pagans (Latin for "heathens", "rural inhabitants") by a protective wall. The mosque arranged in the centre did not fulfil an exclusively religious function in the original sense, but served above all as a political meeting place. The principle of a collective inner space, which is defined and protected by the private spaces arranged around it, can also be found in pre-Islamic typologies as well as in modern, secularized architectures. Furthermore, the spatial structure of a Caravanserai or a traditional Madrese (school) as well as the typically Iranian Meydan with the bazaar arranged around it can be considered.
Actually, the planning dogma of modernity - the open and permeable structure that makes both physical mobility and the free movement of finance and goods possible without restrictions - is diametrically opposed to the principle of the defined community. However, even in a modern and polycentric megacity like Tehran, the wall remains the basic element of a political architecture, which is also an architecture of modernity, as a reversing (!) destination of private and public, as protection from surveillance and restrictions, and as the possibility of inclusion and exclusion of the self/the other.
* Through to the friendly support of the company Fibran.
[1] Hamed Khosravi: “Camp of Faith. The Political Theology of the Islamic City”, in: Pier Vittorio Aureli (Ed.): The City as a Project, Berlin: Ruby Press, 2013.
@IGmA 1: Bayern, München: 100 Jahre Freistaat. Eine Raumverfälschung / Bavaria, Munich: 100 Years of the Free State. A Falsification of Space.
In 2018, Bavaria celebrates the centenary of its Free State – it is time to remember the Munich soviet republic and the State´s socialist origins; it is also time to recapitulate the conservative and emancipatory moments of the Free State; furthermore, it is time to take a closer look at the space and architectural production of Bavaria and its capital, Munich. Bayern, München (Bavaria, Munich) examines the urban in the rural and the rural in the urban and unfolds a cultural-historical panorama that makes the ups and downs of the 20th and 21st centuries - the "Age of Extremes" (Eric Hobsbawm) - comprehensible from a white-blue perspective.
Bayern, München is also an exhibition about a new book called Bayern, München published in 2018 by Stephan Trüby, Verena Hartbaum, c/o now and the University of Looking Good (UoLG). At the centre of the exhibition is the project "The Roderich Model. A Success Story" by Alexandra Haßlacher and the University of Looking Good.
The book Bayern, München consists of many smaller books: a series of essays, written by Elena Markus, Martin Murrenhoff and the editors, take a historical arc from 1918 to 2018 and look at the cultural, architectural and urban development in Bavaria over the last hundred years. Free State experts Stephan Dillemuth, Thomas Meinecke, Michaela Melián, Andreas Neumeister, Hito Steyerl and Raimund Thomas provide insights into Bayern, München, which also enrich current discussions on virulent topics such as right-wing populism and separatism. The common denominator of the contributions is implicitly and explicitly the term "falsification of space", which was introduced in 1903 by the later soviet-republic activist Gustav Landauer in his book Schrift Skepsis und Mystik: Versuche im Anschluss an Mauthners Sprachkritik (Skepticism and Mysticism: Attempts following Mauthner's linguistic criticism). Landauer did not think of eternity as an eternally extended time span, but rather as present in every moment of time. The idea of past and future is a "falsification of space", because only through the transmission of the ideas of space is it suggested that we are at a point from which we can look backwards and forwards at the same time.
Against this background, visualizations of all kinds permeate the book, which turn against the dominant distorting narrative of a purely conservative Bavaria. At the same time, the book also contains falsifications of space: The speculative projects by Sarah Bookman, Nick Förster, Alexandra Haßlacher, Josephine Köhler, Tania Leutbecher, Yan Pechatschek and Leila Unland, which were created at the Department of Architecture and Cultural Theory of the Technical University of Munich, the University of Looking Good (UoLG) and at c/o now in Berlin, highlight hitherto unimagined “Dahoamigkeit“ in the age of globalization. In their published form, they owe their existence to a logic of remix, in which projects went from hand to hand and "falsified" themselves throughout the process.
"The Roderich Model. A Success Story"
By Alexandra Haßlacher, University of Looking Good
The former "Reichssiedlung Rudolf Heß", which was built from 1936 to 1938 in Pullach near Munich and used from 1947 by the organization Gehlen and later by the Federal Intelligence Service (BND), is re-consolidated. It will be done so through the prefabricated house type "Modell Roderich", named after the architect of this settlement, Roderich Fick. With the purchase of the houses one also acquires printers in the BND surveillance camera style, with which one can print out the Instagram feed of the developer. Especially on former NS-terrain the following applies: "It is important what comes out at the back".