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Coffee machines and garden gnomes aside, Brutalist fanatics have a new means of expressing their love for the controversial modernist style, with credit to Frankfurt-based artist Guido Zimmermann. His beautifully-crafted “Cuckoo Blocks” reinvent the traditional Black Forest cuckoo clock with a modernist Brutalism inspired by the architecture of the late 1960s.
More than an aesthetic centerpiece for Brutalist fanatics, the clocks are in fact a response to a decline in the middle class caused by increasing rent prices in modern metropolises.
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The cuckoo clocks are inspired by two brutalist landmarks. The La Flaine hotel by Bauhaus architect Marcel Breuer can be considered either as a piece of expressive constructed art for the modern age, or a grey eyesore sitting awkwardly in an untouched natural Alpine setting. Meanwhile, the Glenkerry House in London by Erno Goldfinger, which once housed the average city dweller, offers a lifestyle which is barely affordable to the Londoner of today.
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The classic cuckoo clock is a symbol for the prosperity of the middle class and is considered a kind of luxury for the home. The updated version, a prefabricated panel construction (“Plattenbau’) reveals today’s urban and social life in residential tower blocks. Increasing rent prices in metropolises are causing the descent of this middle class.
-Guido Zimmermann
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Zimmermann’s “Cuckoo Blocks” series now also includes nest boxes for local songbirds, for the Brutalist garden fanatics not fully content with NINO the gnome. A prototype modeled on a social housing building in Sicily has already been given a seal of approval by a pair of local titmice. Rejecting the three “conventional” nest boxes next door, seemingly none flew over the cuckoo’s nest.
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Zimmermann’s works can be followed via Facebook and Instagram, or on his official website here. Sadly, cuckoos don’t tweet.
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News via: Guido Zimmermann