Culture:City
Exhibition 15th March – 26th May 2013
Akademie der Künste, Hanseatenweg 10, 10557 Berlin
Art and culture have in many ways become key motors of innovative and successful urban design and planning, without which the world’s metropoles would no longer be worthy of the name. The exhibition Culture:City encourages us to think consistently about the future of our cities from this perspective. The architectural exhibition curated by Matthias Sauerbruch for the Akademie der Künste takes a critical eye to the relationship between architecture and the social reality of the 21st century and shows the impact of art and culture on cities and architecture.
The selection of international examples presented – ranging from spectacular architectural and art projects, via the creative reuse of empty buildings and city areas, through to citizens’ initiatives – opens up a panorama of constructed concretisation of culture thus allowing us not only to take stock of the surroundings but also to evaluate and assess each individual case. Does the social, cultural and architectural rootedness in the city work and does this lead to new forms of cultural production? Or does the construction project merely represent a symbol strong on marketing, yet another island in a city’s public spaces characterised by increasing fragmentation?
Beyond the physical presentation of plans and models, this exhibition also offers its visitors a special insight: video tours complete with commentary as well as in-depth background information on tablet computers. These films d’auteur have been prepared by graduates of the German Film and Television Academy in Berlin. In this manner, it is possible to gain three differing perspectives in the exhibition room: that of the architect, that of the curator and that of the filmmaker.
The debate thus triggered is continued in the exhibition in the form of lectures, film screenings, concerts, sound installations and conferences.
Accompanying the exhibition, a comprehensive catalogue will be published by Lars Müller Publishers, Zurich, edited by Wilfried Wang for the Akademie der Künste and includes essays by Kaspar König, Richard Sennett, Michael Mönninger and William J.R. Curtis.
With this exhibition Culture:City, the Architecture Section of the Akademie der Künste continues one of the Academy’s key thematic threads: the debate about Public Spaces. It follows on the heels of the project Return of landscape from 2010, a subject used by the Academy to point out that the city of the future can only be developed from within the landscape.
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