Travel Tip: Art and Archaeology in Poland
Open House

The mostly site-specific architectural designs respond to the particular features of the urban or rural environments for which they were conceived yet also simultaneously address demographic and socioeconomic developments with international relevance. These developments are documented in the empirical part of the exhibition with internationally compiled data on the subject of living environments in a graphically attractive presentation. They include the pluralisation and individualisation of lifestyles and the increasing aging of society as well as issues of energy consumption and sustainability.

Previously on view at the Art Center College of Design, Pasadena, California, the core of the Open House exhibition is the presentation - in various scales and media, from small models, to fully realized installations - of sixteen commissioned project which offer design for intelligent houses, proposals for intelligent living, and examples of intelligent materials. The exhibition also features a timeline that tracks past visions of'future' houses with images and models.

The proposals are presented in the exhibition in three groups. The first group shows designs for houses and buildings with new floor plan concepts, reactive walls, and new interfaces between architecture and digital technologies. With the second group, the emphasis is less on buildings than on systems and concepts for new forms of living and better use of existing resources. In many of these projects, the Internet often plays a primary role. The third group exemplifies some of the most interesting developments currently going on in the area of new materials. They represent some of the new "tools” that will be available to architecture in the future and that enable a dynamisation of formerly static architectural elements.

The selected firms are: 

Atelier Hitoshi Abe (Tokyo, Japan)
Mass Studies (Seoul, Korea)
Sean Godsell Architects (Melbourne, Australia)
HookerKitchen (London, United Kingdom)
EscherGuneWardena Architecture (Los Angeles, USA)
realities:united (Berlin, Germany)
rojkind arquitectos (Mexico City, Mexico)
IwamotoScott (San Francisco, USA)
Joel Sanders, Ben Rubin, Karen van Lengen (New York, USA)
su 11 architecture + design (New York, USA)
Kennedy & Violich Architecture (Boston, USA)
Formorf (Cologne, Germany)