Haus am Waldsee

Graft Architects - Distinct Ambiguity

23 Nov 2011 - 12 Feb 2012

GRAFT ARCHITECTS – DISTINCT AMBIGUITY

Starting November 23, GRAFT will transform the exhibition space on the Waldsee into a scenery for the 21st century. During the exhibition visitors can immerse themselves in the visionary worlds day and night and glean first-hand experience from their installations, pieces of furniture, objects and models of GRAFT‘s take on current issues in architecture.

The emerging team with offices in Berlin, Los Angeles and Beijing creates architectural hybrids which take up current cultures of taste and debates on method and reflect on political as well as aesthetic issues. What appears to be contradictory is reassembled in new and surprising ways. GRAFT are particularly receptive to future realities, in fact more so than most comparable architectural firms operating today.

In the winter of 2011/2012 GRAFT see themselves as a global think tank for design strategies as well as a laboratory for the cultivation of future cultures. They make use of unusually open design practices, distilling inspiration from all spheres of life.

The exhibition entitled “Distinct Ambiguity” displays the entire spectrum of association on which the GRAFT-worlds are based. How does beauty come into being? How come they love a good story? How do you know style is the opposite of curiosity? How do you invent test strategies of forgetting? How does the ambiguously interesting enter the world? The architectural idiom of GRAFT resembles a clever mongrel rather than a sophisticated, fancy breed. Their design process is uncluttered, largely freed of fashionable repetition. GRAFT develops “genetic bastards” in an attempt to break through the barriers of ideology and dogmatism.

Katja Blomberg will edit an elaborate artist‘s book to accompany the exhibition. It will include texts by GRAFT in English (together with a German translation) and will be published with Gestalten Verlag, Berlin.