MUSEUM OF LIFE AND DEATH

Studio Analogue & Digital Production
Academy of Fine Arts Vienna
academic Individual; 2014 (MArch)

Professor: Oliver Domeisen, AAdipl

Vertical Divider

Designing ornament today is a daring task, in both practice and academia and must overcome the bounds of the clean and the white. It is precisely this architectural element, the white wall that is associated with museums, as well as the obsessive and extreme urge for a disembodied and neutral space. So against this, I propose a space out of an intense physicality, and aim to create an environment for the encounter of art that is both tactile and sensuous. It is this, in my opinion that has made exhibition spaces, cold and soulless, lacking a joy and a beauty that can be partly, if not entirely be brought back by ornamentation. Having the body as a motif, the main element in the museum of life is the anthropomorphic column that adopts the iconography of the (flayed) body, and posture reflected through the entire structure by moments of compression and tension that express the effort of the body to retain its position.
The museum of death conceptually and physically renders a scene of horror, and creates unquestionably a foreboding space
However, also other than that, the ornament in this case, reintroduces an intense physicality and reflection towards the environment and enhances the sensation of the encounter for art, which should have been, in the absence of ornament – the white and the clean.