EUTOPIA

David Chipperfield

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David Chipperfield
Neu Nationalgalerie, Berlin [link]

British starchitect David Chipperfield is about to embark on a mission undesired by many: refurbish one of Modernity’s most striking icons – Mies Van der Rohe’s Neu Nationalgalerie in Berlin. As the ultimate physical manifestation of Mies’ “Less is more” architectural motto, the gallery’s geometrical precision and aesthetic perfection must remain unharmed during the imminent restoration, which began this month with a ‘prologue’: an installation by Chipperfield,  consisting of 144 tree-trunk columns inserted to the column-less free glass-encased space,  following the grid of the six feet-thick ceiling hovering above. Resembling a temple, the site-specific installation seems like a last apologetic gesture moments before his blasphemous renovation -the real intervention- begins.

~Gili Merin
photographs courtesy of Gili Merin

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Veletržní Palác

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Veletržní Palác
The National Gallery, Prague

Expecting to find an aging Medieval palace, The Veletržní Palác (Trade-Fair Palace) is nothing of the sort: located in a 1920’s streamline-modernism structure, Prague’s National Gallery is a bizarre hybrid of a poorly-curated museum and overly-ambitious community center where an abundance of art works are assembled against plaster walls painted in pastel-nausea color palette. Leftover Van Gogh’s and forgotten Picasso’s blend into salmon-pink and teenage-purple backdrops while sweaty guards socialize across the gallery’s extruded central atrium. An elusive glimpse of a large Lichtenstein is the sole reminder that we are, in fact, in a somewhat Western-art-aspiring culture.

~ Gili Merin
images by Gili Merin

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Bohuš and Monika Kubinský

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Bohuš and Monika Kubinský
Front Line
DOX Center for Contemporary Art, Prague [link]
6/12 – 9/29/2014

Yet another event marking the hundred-year anniversary to WWI: A monumental site-specific installation in Prague attempts to bring together the two World Wars: Front Line aligns WWI sandbagged-trenches with ball-shaped concrete, one-man, WWII bunkers. Though described by the curators as an abandoned battlefield where the two wars artificially meet, the space bares no resemblance to the chaos it claims to be; in fact, the only juxtaposition is in the two intersecting aesthetic flavors and idealistic notions: the coarse, fragmented relics of an inevitable war, resting neatly within the double-height, white-cubed, brightly illuminated gallery space of the DOX, in the midst of Prague’s post-communist residential plateau.

~ Gili Merin
images courtesy of the author

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Zeche Zollverein Coking Factory

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Zeche Zollverein Coking Factory [link]
Essen, Germany

Once Europe’s largest coal mine and coking factory, the Zeche Zollverein Complex has transformed into a machine-age playground: a rusty mega-creature of intertwining pipes and towering chimneys. Weeds grow over the former rail tracks in this postindustrial, pre-apocalyptic landscape while animals take shelter in derelict boiler houses. Witness the midpoint of entropy; a deterministic fate to all matter. The quasi-romantic erosion of the factory stands in contrast to the bold, out-of-scale concrete cube: a school for management designed by SANAA [link]. Pritzker-chic pretention and lack of students has lead to it’s current state of liquidation: a portent of hubris.

~ Gili Merin

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Berlin Bunker

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© ailine liefeld for freunde von feunden

© ailine liefeld for freunde von feunden

Karl Bonatz, 1943 [link] //  Realarchitektur, 2004 [link]
Berlin Bunker
Berlin, Germany

Midway between the German Reichstag and Kunsthaus Tacheles, stands a Nazi air-raid bunker: fiercely monumental, strictly symmetrical, and a sharply stripped-classicist-style structure of reinforced concrete. Today, after 750 cubic meters of concrete was violently diamond-drilled from 7-feet thick walls and 10-feet thick ceilings, it houses the contemporary art collection of a wealthy advertiser-turned-art-collector, who lives in a luxurious penthouse upstairs with his family. Works by Olafur Eliasson, Wolfgang Tillmans and Ai Wei Wei are all casually swallowed by the massive, exposed walls, which have seen too much. It seems a histor-ectomy is needed, perhaps an anarchic-mad-fetish-techno-rave cleansing is appropriate.

~ Gili Merin

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