The architecture of the Vitra Design Museum is continued in the exhibition space in an exaggerated manner and animated with thermo-sensitive elements, allowing the standards for the comfortable temperature of living spaces to be negotiated as an interactive experience.
Project:
Housewarming my home
Year:
June – September 2007
Exhibition venue:
Vitra Design Museum, Weil am Rhein, Germany
Housewarming MyHome is part of a larger group show at the Vitra Design Museum. The exhibition focuses on contemporary questions concerning the affects of living with and amongst a collection of various installation works. Housewarming MyHome extends the Museum Café into the exhibition area with a large supergraphic displayed on the floor, walls and ceiling, thus blurring their spatial boundaries. Referencing the architectural language of Frank O. Gehry´s deconstructivist buildings, Housewarming MyHome echoes and intensifies the interior space. Certain zones of the wall and seating surfaces are covered with a heat-sensitive coating which turns white upon being warmed. Built in hot wires are programmed to turn on and off, creating temporary ornamental clusters of parallel white lines, which unexpectedly appear and disappear in rhythm with their heating and cooling.
As visitors of the Museum and the Café make contact with the installation, they leave temporary traces, imprints of the temperature-landscape of their bodies. The temperature-sensitive surfaces become the interface of interactivities, coming both from external stimuli via touch and from internal stimuli via the built-in hot wires. As such, the architecture turns into an active participant in relation to the human body.
Partner in charge:
Jürgen Mayer H.
Team:
Marcus Blum
Jonathan Busse
Photographer:
Thomas Dix for Vitra
