7 posts tagged “exhibition design”

After a seamless setup of the show Sandra and I attended the opening of the exhibition Housing in Vienna at the Palazzo Tron in Venice. The day was filled with activities as also the main venue, the Venice Biennale opened the same day. The show in the Palazzo Tron, dedicated to the history and presence of subsidized living in Vienna was opened with speeches by three persons: the Viennese Stadtrat Ludwig, the director of the Wohnbauforschungsinstitut Dr. Wolfgang Förster and the representative of the UIAV, the University of Architecture Venice, Liliana Padovani. The opening was a huge success. We were lucky with the weather as the reception took place in the wonderful garden of this Baroque palazzo. Just as the reception finished it started raining cats and dogs. 

Well, its not hard to guess which is the best place in the US for an exhibition about Wineries. Right, you got it: Napa Valley....give the man, lady a penny! After a successful stint in fantastic Los Angeles the show The Austrian Winery Boom moved on to Napa, the US winemaking heartland. I joined for the exhibition opening and a little winery tour through Napa.

 The exhibition, curated by the Architekturzentrum Wien is on show in Copia, an institution dedicated to Wine, Food and the Arts. Frankly said I was surprised about the extent of the rather modestly sounding institution. It´s a full fledged Museum, about the size of the Kunsthal in Rotterdam, or the Wexner Center. I loved the wonderful, diagonal garden, featuring a full range of fruits and vegetables, used in the Museums fabulous Restaurant (It better be...remember: Wine, Food and the Arts!). The beautiful Cherry Blossom was almost unbearable. The Garden was filled with the scent of fresh spices and flowers. 

Friday night I attended the opening Venue of the exhibition The Austrian Winery Boom which Sandra and myself designed last year. The show was commissioned by the Architekturzentrum Wien, and previously on show at the Austrian Cultural Forum in NYC, before moving on to the MODAA Gallery in Culver City, Los Angeles. The shows opening was pretty crowded by a bunch of architecture afficionados. At the midday opening session I was introduced to Wolfgang Puck, Austria´s representative of Haute Cuisine in Los Angeles and favorite cook to numerous Hollywood celebrities. (No way to escape Hollywood in LA, it seems.) The shows opening was also attended by Dietmar Steiner, the director of the Architekturzentrum Wien (Az W), who repeated his introductory words for the show several times this day. Peter Noever, the director of the MAK in Vienna, also happened to be in LA and dropped by to check out the show. The show was well received and I had to answer many, many times answers on the shows concept and design.

Here are a couple of images of the test assembly we put together yesterday. We tested if everything works as we planed, and how long it needs to setup a portion of the exhibition "Housing in Vienna". The record for building up one pod was set by Phillip, one of the AzW´s hands, with 3min and 42 sec. The Podium of the Architekturzentrum Wien (AzW) doubled as impromptu exhibition space, providing enough space for one colony which at the end had a size of 20ft by 9ft. This colony consisted of eight individuals. Now the entire population consists of forty pods, you get an image of the final appereance.

At the moment we are working on a new exhibition design, commissioned by the AzW in Vienna. The topic of the exhibition Housing in Vienna and deals with the quality of subsidized residential housing in Vienna. Vienna has an interesting history on this term, rooted in the red Vienna of the 20ies of the twentieth century. The efforts continued after the second world war, and by today Viennese authorities take pride in the tradition of providing the sector of social housing with the highest possible quality in terms of the architecture and living standard.The main focus of the exhibition lies on the projects of the last decade and the present. As we had to design the exhibition as a traveling exhibition we had to think about ease of setup, lightweightness and simple transport. Again we relied on the concept of pods, as we did also for The Austrian Winery Boom. (PS.: Still on show at the Austrian Cultural Forum in NYC)
This time we changed the way how the pods interact with each other. The show in New York relied on the combination of three different pods to form a family of objects. This time we used a mathematical tessellation as basis of the setup.

The Cairo Tessellation makes it possible to create one repeating pod that can be assembled in a manyfold way. Different groups of pods cover the various typologies of housing projects described in the exhibition.
The fabrication method: The computer generated form was divided into three sections: Upper Shell, Lower Shell and Limbs. In this way we saved pieces to be assembled to one pod. It´s only three pieces that fit into each other and are connected by small cable fasteners. The forms were milled as negatives by a three axis CNC milling machine. The molds were then casted into hard material to facilitate the vacumforming process. Yesterday I checked out the first test shells. Next week we hopefully will have a finished prototype, and then we can finish the fabrication of the pieces.

Here are some pics from the opening venue. Thanks to Gudrun Hausegger, who was so kind to provide us with the pics she took that night.

So, all the panels are now in the Workshop of the Architekturzentrum Wien (Az W) most of them are finished, only the graphic parts have to be applyed yet. Here you can see a couple of images of the Module C, the smallest of the three modules. The bottle fits pretty good into the craddle that was included in the vacuforming process.