As part of the renewal and expansion of the Vienna Municipal and Provincial Library a new underground storage area was created for the poster archives in court no. 6 of the City Hall. The upper part of the building is rounded off with a work by concept artist couple Lois & Franziska Weinberger. From a bird’s-eye perspective, the formal structure of his work corresponds to the course of the ramified corridors bored by the engraver beetle (Ips typographus).
Following the building measures undertaken in 2004, the biomorphous corridor structures dug into the concrete will be planted with succulent plants of the wall pepper type (from the Sedum family) in spring of 2005. The rockery plants that spread like a carpet will eventually produce a contrast between concrete gray and green vegetation, so that the magnified relief-like system of paths taken from nature becomes increasingly visible.
The corridors alluded to can be continued in the imagination and read as an organic network which extends into the urban setting. As a vegetation-covered drawing the corridor system signals the possibility of a living, permeable exchange between cultural and biological developments. |
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With their intervention that is visible from the corridors of the City Hall, at a place where archived knowledge of the past and contemporary administrative management lie closely together, Lois & Franziska Weinberger take up the model of the roof garden. Here, instead of merely embellishing something with plants, established ideas and design principles are subverted and questions regarding the assimilation of nature and culture are touched upon. Various semantic levels are brought into dialectical relation. While the corridor system of the engraver beetle recalls the destruction of wood, paper and books, the succulent plants covering the ground allude to the moment of preservation. With their work the two Weinberger artists visualise a system of writing nature as an iconographic depiction in damp-proof concrete, juxtaposing this with the forms used for documenting the surrounding environment in the library and administrative offices.
This installation was realised with the support of PORR AG. |
