OUR HOUSE
26 August - 21 October 2018
Green space Kornträgergang (in front of house no. 12), 20355 Hamburg
"Hidden Lines of Space – Our House" is a public space, walkable sculpture in Hamburg's Neustadt. It references past and current floor plans in situ and connects them to other forms of space and living. We shape our buildings first, then they shape us, both as individuals and as part of communities and societies.
The implicit values, instructions for use and power relations conveyed in residential structures are addressed thus in four artistic interventions, a talk and a tour.
Kornträgergang, Hamburg 1928: two rooms, a kitchen area, a passage in front – a typical floor plan from the Gängeviertel, which existed in the Kornträgergang and in the Neustadt district up until the 1930s.
Kornträgergang, Hamburg 1938: a green space, small trees, a street. To the rear: childrens' room, parents' room, kitchen, bathroom – a floor plan from an existing apartment block. These apartments were built in the wake of the redevelopment of the district, which created gaps and empty spaces in the old structures and established small flats and flatlets as self-contained family and one-person units.
"Hidden Lines of Space – Our House" makes old and new residential structure briefly visible (once more). Measuring approximately 50 sq m, the structure – a three-dimensional floor plan collage with different zones – seeks to arrange these and other specific types of floor plans and configurations of rooms, such as a kitchenless flat from the same era. This type of building (the one-kitchen family dwelling for numerous families) was also considered in Hamburg but rejected in favour of the floor plan for residential dwellings, still prevalent today, along with its attendant social thinking.
In conjunction with the one-day art interventions, the talk and the tour, new vehicles for thought and play open up and prompt us to focus our attention on our relationship with (residential) living space as a public concern:
Personal and private life within "one's own four walls" is considered to be a retreat from the public sphere of life, as a self-determined and individual form of existence. However, when we look at residential construction and the political, social and cultural principles that inform it, this assumption becomes relative. Specific traditional or non-traditional floor plans are clearly predicated upon particular values.
