iCP

News   About

24 butterflies
Stadtstücke – City in pieces

  • Location
    London
  • Year
    2002
  • Client
  • Brief
    Artistic research
  • Team
    Wolfgang Fiel
  • Collaborators
  • Status
    Completed

About butterflies

“I tell them everything is possible and at first they do everything – but then they do what is possible.” 1

This collection of 24 butterflies is set to constitute the defining parameters of a personal taxonomy of ideas. Resembling a scientific system of sorts, it aims to allow for spontaneity, prolonged refinement, augmentation, or necessary constraint. It can also be understood as useful mechanism for the spatial representation of conceptual links between ideas, drawings, and working models. I liken the transient nature of the system with the fleeting beauty and seeming weightlessness of butterflies. Being put into question with every emergent line of though, ideas have to stand the test of time. Despite their limited lifespan, the breath-taking beauty of butterflies instantly arouses adventurous flights of fancy.

“The architecture of cinema utilizes the entire range of emotion, and the touching architecture of Tarkovsky's films, for instance, could encourage architects to expand the emotional contents of their spaces, designed to be actually dwelled and lived in. Construction in our time has normalized emotions into the service of the social situations of life and has, at the same time, censored the extremes of the scale of human emotions: darkness and fear, dreams and reverie, elation and ecstasy. Suppressed emotions, however, seek their object and exposure. Anxiety and alienation, hardly hidden by surface rationalization, are often the emotional contents of today's everyday setting. The dimension of the ‘heimlich’ hides its opposite, the ‘unheimlich’, always ready to enter the scene.” 2

1) Vladislav Kirpichev, The Power of Contemporary Architecture. Cook, P. and Neil, S. (eds.). Academy Editions, London 1999, pp. 60-61.

2) Juhani Pallasmaa, The Architecture of Image: Existential Space in Cinema. Rakennustieto Publishing, Helsinki, p. 35.

iCP

24 butterflies
Stadtstücke – City in pieces

Thank You for Sharing!