Dorit Margreiter (A)

Die Sprache anschauen und/oder die Dinge lesen (Look at Language and/or Read Things)
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This work displays the sketch Anatomy of a Dwelling (1965) by Reyner Banham in conjunction with François Gallegret as illustration for Reyner Banham’s essay The Unhouse, a text about the relationships between design, technology and architecture. The project addressed in the essay was a design for an “unhouse,” a house defined exclusively by its functionality. The illustration I used is an enlarged plate from the book Modernism to Mod (1987), a lexicographic summary of pop design by Nigel Whiteley. The decision on whether technology should be visible, a part of the aesthetic concept, or should instead disappear behind another aesthetic solution is apparent in many respects in the Lakeside Park building complex, on one hand through the architectonic design itself, and on the other through the companies located here. The enlarged drawing – placed in the entrance area – can also be read as an alternative guidepost through the building complex. (D.M.)

Dorit Margreiter’s work articulates in terms of architecture one of the fundamental issues addressed in the Lakeside Art Program – the question of the relationship between the visibility (image) and the invisibility of work and economic processes. By making reference to the influential architectural critic Reyner Banham and his inclusion in an already postmodern publication, she points to the ideological shifts in the transition from modern to postmodern, and from material forms of production to immaterial development processes in techno-capitalism. The question of what lies beneath, or behind, the architectonic façade can equally well be applied to the often concealed material and physical resources of a seemingly purely information-based economy of data streams and capital flows.