OCTOBER 2021
RønholtKurz - Somnambulist Architecture
Since the beginning of 2020 educated architect Jens Rønholt Schmidt and artist Veit Laurent Kurz investigate together the historic, aesthetic and social space between art and architecture. Movements and individuals operating between those lines during the 20th and 21st century became of particular interest within this collaboration. For this first display of RønholtKurz projects at Die Kette, a generation of artistarchitects that found faith through utopias and fantasies, a generation who’s spacial, aesthetic and social thinking considered mental as well as expressive needs of an individual, formed the conceptual backbone.
The Crystal Chain, a written correspondence which appeared in the turbulent following years of WWI , was initiated by Bruno Taut and brought artists, poets and architects in dialogue. The Correspondence found application through the so called „Arbeitsrat für Kunst „(workers council of art) whose founding members were as well Taut and the lateron director of the Bauhaus school Weimar and Dessau, Walter Gropius. As in Literary critic Kurt Pinthus`s Trinity, Geist - Spirit, Gefühl - Feeling and Wille - Will, became the center of aesthetic and architectural conceptions with the higher goal of a betterment of the human condition.
Gropius, as the Bauhaus director transfered this philosophy and way of thinking onto the institutional model. Besides a fruitful outcome the increasing interest in industrial fabrication and production partially moved the individual aside and opened the door for standardization and pure utilization of space, setting the fundament for architectural models that are in their spiritless forms, predominant models of contemporary building culture.
With regards to a present day situation of ecologic and social tasks RønholtKurz picked up a dialog similar to the once existing letter correspondence, reflecting on the current relationship between art and architecture, attempting to question the omnipresent standards of both artistic and architecture culture.
- Fifi Laurent
