M-City ConePLEX Installation

1. DATA
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Place /Date
___KunsthausGraz, Graz, Austria
___2005 (Built)
Clients
___KunsthausGraz
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2. DESCRIPTION
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M-City was a large exhibition that took place in the KunsthausGraz, the “friendly alien” building designed by Peter Cook and Colin Fournier. Dedicated to the examination of new urban landscapes in average European cities, it presented the works of 30 different artists structured in two main curatorial subjects: urban themes (1st floor) and city portraits (2nd floor) Invited to design the installation to accommodate this dense programmatic organization, ReD was interested in exploring the striking features of the Kunsthaus building to inform the generation and development of the proposal. ReD’s design concept was focused on creating a response of the ceiling to the artwork laid out beneath, controlling the light and suggesting various circulation paths. While this similar concept was applied to both floors, their spatial differences suggested two formally distinct installations: FLUOScape and CONEplex.
CONEplex is the installation developed by ReD in the 2nd floor of the Kunsthaus, to accommodate the portrait section of the M-City exhibition, which consisted in six video projections about Basel, Krakow, Graz, Ljubljana, Ruhrstadt and Trieste. Created to avoid the conventional definition of enclosed and orthogonal rooms, lightweight conical elements were designed by ReD to be suspended from the existing skylights. Without touching the ground, these intimate spaces were gently tilted to invite visitors to gather beneath them, view the projections and move easily on to the next. Departing from a same set of geometric rules, the six cones were parametrically differentiated to adjust them to the variable height of the space. Both their textile skin and metal structure was CNC fabricated in Germany, following the geometry of the 3D digital models developed by ReD. Once installed in space, CONEplex created a dynamic exhibition environment with no preconceived or linear trajectory for the visitors.
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3. CREDITS
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Architecture
___ReD, Research+Design
Design Team
___M. Malé-Alemany
___J. Pedro Sousa
Collaboration
___Teddy Slowik (project assitant)
___Neils Junkhans (local architect)
___Lichwitz (graphic design)
Production
___Procedes (Barcelona, Germany)
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4. PROJECT IMAGES
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Figure 01: Exhibition's image
(Photo Credits: Inês d'Orey / ALMAMATE)
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Figure 02: Exhibition's image
(Photo Credits: Inês d'Orey / ALMAMATE)
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Figure 03: Exhibition's image
(Photo Credits: Inês d'Orey / ALMAMATE)
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