WHAT IS BEYOND RATIONAL?

The past two decades has witnessed a dramatic rise in technology as an aid to architecture whether from a material, a production, or a logistical point of view. While architects often serve as mediators between technological changes, culture and society, translating the advancements into spaces that alter our habits and behavior, technology has also changed the way that we think and design projects. The role of technology is not simply rational but also philosophical, sensational, and conceptual.

Showing objects, projects and ideas from young architects now practicing in Zurich, the exhibition hopes to highlight not only the emerging voices of design but also the thoughts and trajectories that have resulted from contemporary tools and techniques. The contributions run across a spectrum from the pioneers of new digital technologies in form-making to the revisiting of low-tech means in confronting our social and ecological responsibilities.

Michael Hansmeyer presents his Platonic Solids, an investigation of mathematical polyhedras created through highly rigorous and iterative steps that belies the rationality of the computational logic and take us beyond what our imagination alone can produce. ROK’s Flat2Form brings geometry and digital processes to structural ornamentation, questioning our common assumptions of materiality while Ueli Degen and Merkli Architekten show that low-tech ideas when applied at a large scale can also make a difference. Re-using PET-bottles, their lamps challenge us to take on the responsibility that comes with modern technology to make design accessible to all. Karamuk Kuo, combining low-tech construction with hi-tech logistical programming, show that our world, like the technologies that we use are often not so easily categorizable and that design thinking necessarily has to adapt. ILAI and Duplex Architekten each present material and spatial studies to current architectural projects, the results of a sensibility that embeds architecture within a culture of making. Hosoya Schaefer Architects show two films, using a medium that has come to define more and more design communication. L(E)ICHTRAUM is a structural investigation using logics, rules and algorithms to produce radically lightweight, ribbon-like columns while Mobiglobe turns to much grander issues to question what the mobility of the future might be. And last, but not least, futurafrosch presents 144 thought-provoking ideas to get us out of our seats to engage with technology.

Liberated from the prosaic constraints of typical construction projects, and the functionalism that often defines our measure of technology, the exhibited works chart relationships between technology and design, whether high- or low-tech, whether material or immaterial, to speculate beyond just the rational.

Karamuk Kuo Architects: Micromacro

Micromacro with Pet Lamps from Ueli Degen

MICROMACRO (2010)
by Karamuk Kuo Architects

We are interested in taking the familiar and the everyday to produce moments of unexpected beauty where common assumptions and perceptions of scale can suddenly change. What is thought of as singular and autonomous is in reality inextricably linked. What is first perceived as an object can dissolve into a landscape or a city. What is understood as hard and heavy all of a sudden becomes lighter than air. It is in this world of ambiguity and multiplicity that everyone can interpret their own MicroMacro -- a place that is everyplace and noplace at the same time.

Using Styropor, a common building insulation material, but also a common modeling material in architecture offices, the piece is composed of 800 hand-cut pieces designed and logistically planned with a computer algorithm. In this sense, technology is for us not exclusive but rather the most interesting when hi- and low-tech converge.
http://www.karamukkuo.com/
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