For more than 15 years, the Swiss office Geiger Herrmann Architekten has been preoccupied with the experiential quality of space in all of its facets. At the core of their activities is a striving to allow the qualities of interior and exterior spaces and their interconnections and forms of interplay to be experienced in everyday life - whether in residential, office, hotel, or commercial buildings. These architects create spaces in which people can feel comfortable, can be themselves. Their buildings insert themselves in seemingly self-evident ways into their contexts, and are at the same time tailored to the personalities of their residents.
At the center of the exhibition «Raum schafft Ort – Ort schafft Raum / Space Creates Place – Place Creates Space» is a hotel project: at the Wolfsburg Conference Center of the Swiss financial services company UBS in Ermatingen, the concerns of Arndt Geiger Herrmann find their consummate expression. The linkages between interior and exterior spaces, the materialization, the embeddedness of the new building in the singular landscape of the Bodensee region, as well as the reshaping of the historic ensemble through a sensitive contemporary architectural idiom: all of these elements highlight the leitmotif of the interplay between space and place. Here, location and space, interior and exterior arrive at a harmonious fusion.
Also on display will be a selection of five other projects which demonstrate how these architects choreograph the interrelatedness of place and space on various scales. The commercial building Bellerive in Zürich, surrounded by traffic flows, generates an urbanistically sensitive location - a new address that functions as a gateway to the city. The residential estate of Kittenmühle in Herliberg shapes its unique natural setting at the edge of a forest into striking qualities for both interior and exterior zones. Three single-family houses or villas set along Lake Zürich illustrate how the coherence of a specific location can be discovered and scenarized independently of the views it might offer. Whether confronting modest or large-scale building tasks, René Arndt and Thomas Geiger proceed on the basis of the same premises, with the same circumspection and painstaking care: “We do not plan buildings simply as envelopes which just need to be filled. Instead, the location of the building is decisive for its materialization, its form and appearance, its interior. Every setting calls for a different architecture, one that is genuinely adapted to it.”
Through models, images, and plans, the atmospheric design of this exhibition vividly conveys the creative approach of this duo. The exhibition space will be configured around an accessible, physically substantial installation which takes up elements of the office’s lucid, rectangular idiom, at the same time providing a “room within a room,” a retreat which enjoys a variety of views to the outside. Here, Marc Schwarz’s film portrait of these architects and their team finds a suitable and tranquil frame.
Catalogue
An Aedes catalogue was published.
With a text by Jürgen Tietz
ISBN 978-3-937093-18-5
German/English
Price € 10,-
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