From December 2022, the ZKM | Zentrum für Kunst und Medien Karlsruhe will present the first major solo exhibition on the work of the internationally renowned architect Ole Scheeren.
Image above: Ole Scheeren »Fifteen Fifteen« © Buro-OS, Rendering: Binyan Studios
Ole Scheeren is one of the best-known contemporary architects internationally, who has made a name for himself worldwide in particular with innovative high-rise buildings and residential projects. For him, architecture is a kind of body or stage of human life. Beyond their pure functionality, his buildings activate the ideas, fantasies and emotions of the people who live and work in them in the sense of Scheeren’s motto “form follows fiction”.
Since 2010, Ole Scheeren has been running his office with branches in Hong Kong, Beijing, Berlin and London. With his designs, he stands for complex, technologically advanced building that, despite its sometimes enormous dimensions, is always oriented towards people’s needs.
As the world’s best high-rise project for urban living space, his residential complex The Interlace in Singapore was awarded the “Urban Habitat Award” by the Council for High-Rise Buildings and Urban Living in Chicago in 2014, and “World Building of the Year” by the international World Architecture Festival in 2015. Instead of typical high-rise towers, the structures of the large-scale complex, comprising more than a thousand residential units, were placed horizontally on a hexagonal grid and stacked in several layers. Like The Interlace in Singapore, the 314-metre-high MahaNakhon tower in Bangkok, completed in 2018, is one of the most recognisable structures in the world. The building’s pixelated structure forms a band of terraces and protrusions surrounding the tower that extends across its entire height, revealing its inner workings to the outside world. The headquarters of the Chinese state television CCTV in Beijing, for whose design and realisation Ole Scheeren was responsible as a partner at OMA, is one of the largest buildings in the world with its iconographic loop shape.
Under the title Ole Scheeren: Spaces of Life, the ZKM | Centre for Art and Media is dedicating a comprehensive solo exhibition to the Karlsruhe-born architect, which focuses on the experience of architecture via expansive installations in the high atriums.
Peter Weibel, artistic and scientific director of the ZKM, says: “Ole Scheeren’s projects are the result of intensive experimental urban field research. They are amazingly aesthetic solutions to social and ecological considerations. Architecture becomes a living system in which all participants from humans to plants are co-beings that cohabit.”
WHERE?
Zentrum für Kunst und Medien Karlsruhe, Lorenzstraße 19 76135 Karlsruhe
WHEN?
Saturday, 10. December 2022 until Sunday, 4. June 2023
