TATLIN NEWS #42

PhotograPhy of Emotions

practices contemporary architecture. Often things coming forth out of the quill of Prix and Swiczinsky donot evoke unreserved acceptance at once, and even look ridiculous at times. But the language of their architecture is always 100% recognizable. It is nice that even in prone years when one could well put his feet up and retire on the laurels and then fall asleep in the Lord, the Austrian duet still remains interested in large-scale projects adequate of their status, as well as installations – such as for example their works created for the exhibition in MAK museum – which in turn means they are still interested in perfecting their ideas and mastery. After a certain creative boundary – and everyone has it at different times, after five, ten, or twenty years – any exhibition of any architectural bureau is destined to become a retrospective one, since the background is both a heritage and a stone around the neck. And from this point of view one cannot but find himself blue, but COOP architects have already overcome their middle age crisis. Vigorous architEcturE 07.11.07–20.04.08 | 1973: sorry, out of gas | canadian centre for architecture, montreal, canada | www.cca.qc.ca The exhibition explores the development of architecture spurred by the crisis of 1973, when the value of gas exceeded all reasonable standards, and the situation triggered the emergence of energy-saving facilities. Uncontrollable urban growth that followed the Second World War and was based on resources at low prices has exhausted itself by the seventies, and the exhibition investigates how architecture and urbanism responded to the new reality. The exhibition is of particular relevance in the context of disappointing forecasts that the world has another fifty years of unconcerned consumption of all the resources, which then will be followed by a collapse. It is high time to consider developing new technologies, and wind mills, solar in

06.10.07–27.01.08 | Berlin Projects, Photographs by helene Binet | arkitekturmuseet, stockholm, sweden | www.arkitekturmuseet.se Socialization of architecture takes place on its own, when ethics, urban growth and ecology arise as subjects for discussion within its framework. But photography turns out to be an additional medium to create some speculative synthesis of architecture and the social aspect of culture. Thus, in Berlin Projects by Helene Binet memorials to victims of the Nazi era take central stage. The author of the series has chosen five objects: these are «Victims» of John Hejduk, Raoul Bunschoten’s Berlin Apeiron, the Jewish Museum by Daniel Liebeskind, an incomplete exhibition centre by Peter Zumthor created for the «Topography of Terror» exhibition, and Peter Eisenman’s Holocaust Memorial. The concept of the series is to show these structures as a suspended play of light and shadow by means of black and white photography, to define both historic and contemporary context for it, to reflect their existence as gestures instead of as objects of architecture, which always are a compromise between the scale of the idea and the scale of the human being. Binet tries to neutralize this contradiction, bringing emotions to the forefront, because it is emotions that reveal a man in any architect, and the creative impulse in any building. no BluE 12.12.07–11.05.08 |«cooP himmElB(l)au. Beyond the Blue» | maK museum, Vienna, austria| www.mak.at Forty years of uncompromising search in the field of visionary and experimental architecture made COOP HIMMELB(L)AU one of the most notable and innovative

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