The exhibition How Soon Is Now? by a group of 12 Berlin-based studios of architects, designers, and engineers, revisits some themes of the legendary exhibition This Is Tomorrow held at the Whitechapel Art Gallery in London in 1956. Given today’s range of contemporary social, economic, and ecological issues in combination with the acceleration of technological change, we are positioned in an inclusive and complex time. If yesterday’s tomorrow is not today, how soon is now? What values and possibilities can we imagine with a more speculative approach that is unburdened by the constraints of everyday practice? The exhibition discusses—through spatial interventions and manifestos—what today’s sensibilities and needs might be and where they might be leading. Speculating in antagonistic collaboration—initiated by Frank Barkow, Arno Brandlhuber. and Sam Chermayeff—sets up a program for the future.
The contribution to the exhibition by Brandlhuber+ is a modified version of 0126 VRMD (VierRichtungsModulDiagonal) based on the housing subsidy provisions in Berlin in 2014 (Wohnbauförderungsbestimmungen 2014), and represented through a volume of rope tensions. The provisions of 2014 stipulated a flat module of 56.5 square meters. For the exhibition, the modules are turned against one another, so that they do not cross perpendicularly, but diagonally, juxtaposed independently of the orientation of the plot itself. The “6,50€/m2-Apartment” illuminates the possibilities of an architecturally challenging living and working space within a small space on two floors, for the rental price of a mere 6.50 Euros per square meters. The installation was accompanied by the brochure “6,50 Euro/m²-Wohnung (für die soziale Wohnraumförderung in Berlin 2014) Case Study: VierRichtungsModulDiagonal — 56,50 m²,” in which the calculation of the subsidies is illustrated in detail. Download the publication here.
© Jan Bittner
© Jan Bittner
© Jan Bittner
© Brandlhuber+
© Jan Bittner