Incidental Space

The new exhibition at the gta exhibition gallery positively reflects the potential of architectural production in the form of a highly technological interdisciplinary practice.

The exhibition “Making of Incidental Space” complements the presentation of the Swiss contribution to the 15th Architecture Biennale in Venice by the architect Christian Kerez together with the curator Sandra Oehy.

The project by the Kerez is intended as fundamental research – an exhibition as inquiry. As part of the Swiss contribution to the Biennale Architettura 2016, its aim is to investigate the possibilities – both in technical feasibility and the limits of our own imagination – of how to think, build and experience architecture differently. “Incidental Space” attempts to explore the outer limits of what can be achieved in architecture today. How can you use the medium of architecture to contemplate an architectural space that is entirely abstract and as complex as possible? How could this kind of imaginary space even be visualized, and how could it be produced? The goal of this project was not to create a built space using any specific construction method, design method, or spatial program. Instead, with the help of an abstract architectural objective, it aimed to produce an “atomized” space, a small space with maximum possible complexity and with infinite interior extension – a space whose visual character cannot be something easily decoded, that doesn’t depict or represent any other space, that defies univocality and withdraws from any unambiguous legibility.

In short, Christian Kerez sought to create a space that in no way corresponds to what architecture has hitherto considered to be architectural space. With his project, Kerez reveals the extent to which the depiction of architecture can alter the very nature and possibilities of architecture. Incorporating the ephemeral aspect of an exhibition “Incidental Space” could only be achieved at this specific moment in time using the latest technologies and all available resources, extended research groundwork and expertise of an extensive network of collaborators.

“The Making of Incidental Space” positively reflects the potential of architectural production in the form of a highly technological interdisciplinary practice of architecture that goes above and beyond the building. The exhibition affords a deeper insight into the interdisciplinary network of collaborators at the Department of Architecture, the expertise, the joint research and into the experiments that enabled “Incidental Space” as a project in the first place, and which constitute it as such. It is a testimony to a collective search for an imperative in the fundamental reflections on the eventualities of building and thinking architectural spaces today.