Architectural Installation and Lounge for the Berlinale (satellite event)
From 20th of January until the 1st of March, accompanying the Berlin International Film Festival 2007, the architecture forum Aedes presents GRAFTWORLD, the most recent work produced by architecture office GRAFT. It will show projects of its locations in Los Angeles, Berlin and Beijing, including urban design, architecture, interior design, temporary exhibitions and product design.
The exhibition
In addition to GRAFT’s the widely published projects, like the prize-winning Hotel Q in Berlin, Restaurants Fix and Stack in Las Vegas and several international houses, the exhibition will focus on the new and unpublished work of GRAFT, including numerous high-rise buildings, special hotel designs and private residences, research installations as well as public projects. GRAFTWORLD refers to GRAFT’s specific method of work process, which fuses syntactic, semantic and phenomenological aspects into architecture. GRAFT uses narrative elements of cinema, exploiting space - time interconnections through storyboarding with progressive technical research of long term collaborations with various companies. The exhibit will showcase this methodology in an accessible, usable exhibition sculpture, an interactive lounge displaying not only projects of all three office locations but providing chillout zones to relax as well. Classical distinctive architecture elements like floor, wall and ceiling will be fused into a lounge-display-hybrid. GRAFTWORLD is thought to be inclusive and rather crosses and blurs boundaries than accepting their exclusive nature. This approach also touches on the increasing transition of distinct modern mono-functional living and working environments, that are blending into new urban lifestyles of the metropolitan nomads. GRAFTWORLD proposes architecture that can evolve to be sculpture, be furniture, be a product, be an urban scenario, be landscape at the same time. Design, methodology and technology are not classically “displayed”, but are integrated in the GRAFTWORLD.
The office
In 1998 GRAFT was founded by Lars Krückeberg, Wolfram Putz and Thomas Willemeit as a “Label” for architecture, design, music and „ the pursuit of happiness“. In 2001 they opened a second office in Berlin and together with partner Gregor Hoheisel another one in Beijing in 2004. The office has approx. 45 employees. The partners are members of the Bund Deutscher Architekten, BDA. The English word “graft” provokes a variety of meanings and multiple readings. It stands for transplants in the field of medicine, for cheating, but also for hard work. In the terminology of botany, it describes the grafting of one shoot onto a genetically different host. The positive properties of two genetically different cultures are combined in the new hybrid with superior performance. GRAFT sees architecture as an interaction of various architectural influences, styles, tendencies, tastes and different cultures, which can be forged into new meaning, form and character. Architecture of new combinations, global transfers of architectonic beauty, robust crossbreeds - architecture derived out of circumstances, which can only be created through the grafting of different realities and scales. GRAFT’s work includes and interrelates dimensions from urban design and architecture to stage and product design. Seen in the context of the form driven “New Wild” of the architecture scene GRAFT is part of an international Avantgarde that is interested in advanced, amorphic formal vocabulary. The research and realisations of the office show the interest in new parametric possibilities to create complex volumes and shapes, provided by the evolution of computer aided design.
Catalogue
An Aedes catalogue was published.
With texts by Dave Hickey and Seung H-Sang
ISBN 978-3-937093-76-1
German/English/Chinese
Price € 10,-
