Cross-Atmosphering

Exhibition curated by Ilka & Andreas Ruby
held at salon blauraum, Hamburg, 02.10.2003-05.11.2003

The exhibition presents a selection of works realized by the Slovenian architecture office Sadar Vuga Arhitekti. The title “Cross-Atmsphering” highlights a particular aspect of their work which opens up a new conceptual space for architecture beyond the established positions of the 1990s. Briefly, atmosphering means that a project’s atmosphere cannot be directly deducted from its program (a library with a librarykind-of-atmosphere). It comes into play rather from aside, subliminally manipulating the project just like the soundtrack of a movie completely conditions our perception of the image.

Thus atmosphering makes it possible to give a library the atmosphere of a swimming-pool, without actually implementing the swimming-pool in the library. In order to visualize the power and efficiency of this “embedded atmospheres”, the exhibition features the work of Sadar Vuga Arhitekti in a latently fictional way: Every project is presented with a bigscale photographic print and a short text reproduced at the same size. Bluntly cutting out the project’s program, the text seizes upon its atmosphere to transform it into a scenario which surreptitiously takes the place of its actual program. In this way, the effect of atmosphering on architecture becomes transparent: to expand the affective range of a project by endowing it with a higher ambiguity and conceptual flexibility.

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