Berlin 2013/1983 ? By Daniel Young and Christian Giroux, with essays by Anh-Linh Ngo, Kenneth Hayes, Anne Huffschmid and Sandra Bartoli. Arch + Verlag, 2018
Canadian artists Daniel Young and Christian Giroux have long focused on both the architecture of the banal, and the banality of architecture. They?ve produced sculpture from IKEA flatpacks, HVAC components and department store racks, referencing ironically and a little sadly the utopianism and the commercialism of modernist architecture, from Bucky Fuller?s geodesic domes to office-building curtainwall. Like arte povera and Marcel Duchamps?s ?readymades? before them, their work targets the privileging of visual perception and the alienation created by modern production systems. Practising architects are only too aware of our involuntary complicity as we engage in mastering those standardized codes and regulations, while struggling to create places with value and meaning for human life. The risk is that the spaces we produce become little more than images that mask an impoverished reality. Young and Giroux have documented that entanglement with technocratic reality in video-based works like Every Building, or Site, that a Building Permit Has Been Issued for a New Building in Toronto in 2006, and Infrastructure Canada (2012). Now they have turned their eyes to Berlin. The product of a recent arts residency, the original goal was to document structures built in 2013 along with nearby buildings from three decades earlier. P...