Barkow Leibinger: 2D:3D

The installation by Barkow Leibinger at the BDA (German Association of Architects) Berlin Gallery takes on the debut for a series focusing on 2D, 3D in architecture.

Covering the wall surfaces of the small gallery space with “tapete” or wallpaper the facade of the storefront gallery frames what Leon Battista Alberti described as a fenestra aperta.

In this configuration the space of the gallery is a projection/ extension of the streetscape in the bourgeois residential historical Mommsenstrasse neighborhood.

Playing with the concept directive 2D 3D, the wall paper on one side of the gallery is a two dimensional pattern: an organic looping structure which repeats and mirrors itself that is both ornamental and geometrically structural in its architectural implication. On axis with the street front facade at the back of the gallery is a wallpaper “portrait” of this system in black and white but now projected as a one-point perspective optically extending the perspective of the gallery itself.

Barkow Leibinger, 2D:3D installation. © Gustav Duesing

Suspended from the historical Jugenstil decorated ceiling is a new ceiling of plywood veneer loops patterned on the drawings but of a 10 cm depth at a 240cm clear height (door height) above the floor. This dropped ceiling makes physical (3D) the 2D drawings while transforming the scale of the gallery to one that is both more domestic, like a living room, and akin to the historical apartments in the neighborhood. A small relief-scaled wall hanging of the same pattern on the remaining sidewall of the gallery completes the idea of a domestically scaled space. The pattern selected is a scalable one and was originally developed as a large span roof structure.