Exhibition: Searching for an Ideal Urbanity

Ten years after the groundbreaking exhibition and publication “Next to the City,” which analyzed questions of urbanity with the city of Stuttgart as an example, the Italian (then a participating fellow) architect and Akademie jury chairman Fabrizio Gallanti assembles an interdisciplinary project with contributions from the areas of architecture, visual arts, design, literature and music.

When the French philosopher Henri Lefebvre criticized urbanism as an authoritarian and immediately-antiquated controlling practice in the 1970s, he suggested observing the “urban condition” – his term for the time’s shift in the social economic and therefore also urban space – as a complex, independent and unstable network of relationships.

Which forms of urbanity have developed in the present? How is the “urban condition” influenced by the local context? How are traditions reflected in it? Is the (public) space the gauge for deciphering change? Because the image of the ideal city as we know it from the renaissance is increasingly dissolving, a new concept of urbanity could function as an instrument for our survival. The exhibition is conceived as an initial experiment as a platform for exchanging ideas of the topic.

The project was initiated by Fabrizio Gallanti (Architect, Italy and Akademie jury chair from 2002 to 2006) and Jean-Baptiste Joly. Participants include: Pier Vittorio Aureli (Architect, Italy), Sarnath Banerjee (Author, India), Raed Bawayeh (Photographer, Palestine), Dafne Berc/Luciano Basauri (Architects, Croatia), Sanford Biggers (Artist, USA), Susanne Bürner (Artist, Germany), Jean-Francois Chevrier (Art historian, France), Karin Damrau (Architect, Germany), Ingrid Hora (Artist, Great Britain/Italy), Dagmar Keller/Martin Wittwer (Artists, Germany), Q Takeki Maeda/Jay Chung (Artist, Germany/Japan/USA), Andrea Melloni (Composer, Germany/Italy), Ligia Nobre (Architect, Brazil) with Paola Salerno (Photographer, France/Italy), Marzena Nowak (Artist, Poland), Maxi Obexer (Author, Germany/Italy), Zoran Pantelic (Artist, Serbia), Patricia Reed (Artist, Canada/Germany), Henrietta Rose-Innes (Author, South Africa), Alexander Schellow (Artist, Germany), SMAQ (Architects, Germany/Netherlands), Cobi van Tonder (Composer, South Africa), Popok Tri Wahyudi (Artist, Indonesia), Stephen Waddell (Artist, Canada/Germany), Srdjan Jovanovic Weiss (Architect, Serbia/USA), Annett Zinsmeister, Architect and artist, Germany).

The exhibition is on view from March 30 to Sunday, May 13, 2007
Hours: Tue-Thurs 10am-noon & 2-5:30pm, Fri 10am-noon & 2-4pm, Sat-Sun noon-5:30pm.
The exhibition is closed on Good Friday (April 6, 2007) and Easter Monday (April 9, 2007).

Further related events:
Thursday, May 3, Uhr: Lecture by Prof. Matthias Sauerbruch »Über den Urbanitätsbegriff in der deutschen Architektur der letzten 20 Jahre« (Use of the term urbanity in German architecture of the past twenty years).

Friday, May 4, 2007, 10 am to 6 pm: Workshop »Ideal Urbanity« with SMAQ, Jean-Francois Chevrier, Fabrizio Gallanti and Pier Vittorio Aureli.

Saturday. May 5, 2007, 6 pm: Filmprogram »Searching for an ideal urbanity« with films by Susanne Bürner, Daniel Kunle (»nicht-mehr | noch nicht« and »Neuland«), Korpys/Löffler («Digging Deep« and »Supersam«) and Q Takeki Maeda/Jay Chung.