Through this installation, Swiss architect Valerio Olgiati explores the ambiguous and complex “common ground” of inspiration and imagination in architecture. Images, selected by architects from around the world, represent the infinitely varied forms of visual material that are collected in their imaginations and subsequently transformed through the creative process.
From Valerio Olgiati:
For the installation I asked 41 contemporary architects to select images that refer to something important for their work or for them as practitioners. Architects whom I consider to be the most unique working today. Each architect creates a personal musée imaginaire by selecting one to ten images of different meanings and contents, depending on their own universe. Some collect images of memories, inspirations and atmospheres. Others talk by collecting images of analysis, explanations or manifestos. And yet others explain principles of their own architecture or simply show the things they like, consciously or unconsciously. It is about the visual world stored in the head of architects.
Together these 323 images represent a monumental view at the fountainhead of contemporary architects.
The installation in this space mainly consists of a horizontal slab, hanging in the exact moddle height of the room. It is an intervention that expresses order looking from far away. However, upon approaching, it turns into an architectural object. By entering the object, a new deliberately symbolic space appears. In the middle of this space, on an additional slab, the pictographs of the architects are exhibited as icons.
List of architects: David Adjaye, Francisco & Manuel Aires Mateus, Alejandro Aravena, Mario Botta, Alberto Campo Baeza, Adam Caruso & Peter St John, Preston Scott Cohen, Hermann Czech, Roger Diener, Peter Eisenman, Sou Fujimoto, Anton Garcia Abril, Go Hasegawa, Jacques Herzog & Pierre de Meuron, Steven Holl, Anne Holtrop, Junya Ishigami, Arata Isozaki, Toyo Ito, Bijoy Jain (Studio Mumbai), Momoyo Kaijima & Yoshiharu Tsukamoto (Atelier Bow-Wow), Christian Kerez, Hans Kollhoff, Winy Maas (MVRDV), Peter Märkli, Jürgen Mayer H., Richard Meier, Valerio Olgiati, John Pawson, Cecilia Puga, Smiljan Radic, Richard Rogers, Kazuyo Sejima, Jonathan Sergison & Stephen Bates, Miroslav Sik, Alvaro Siza, Eduardo Souto de Moura, Ben van Berkel, Robert Venturi & Denise Scott Brown, Peter Wilson (Bolles+Wilson) and Peter Zumthor.
