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.

Michael Hansmeyer: From Mesh to Ornament

FROM MESH TO ORNAMENT
Subdivision as Generative System (2010)
by Michael Hansmeyer

This project explores the use of subdivision algorithms for the production of three-dimensional ornaments. An unarticulated mesh - often a platonic solid - is recursively divided into smaller and smaller faces. This single operation affects the form’s topography and topology, generating attributes such as branching, porosity and fractalization. The resulting forms an astounding complexity that largely defies attempts at reductionism.
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