House with clear shapes and a complex entrance

Los Angeles is for everyone the sunny and chaotic US metropolis: the one whose beaches, plains, hills and freeways the critic Reyner Banham described. Nodal in the celebrated book Los Angeles. The Architecture of Four Ecologies is the concept of “ecology”, not as a simple “protection” of the environment, but as a product of the integration of “geography, climate, economy, demography, technology and culture”. Many fewer people know about another Los Angeles, which is located on the edge of the village of Günsterode, near Kassel, Germany. It is a 3,000 square metre inhabitable sculpture park created by artist Jonas von Ostrowski with the intention of exploring the potential of a rural environment in relation to the urban context.

Following Banham’s definition, the Los Angeles art project is a proper (micro)ecology: a place where artists and art lovers can live, work and communicate with each other and with the public. Los Angeles hosts artist residencies, exhibitions, workshops and other cultural events.

The first habitable sculpture made in this area is the House With Clear Shapes And A Complex Entrance, a three-person dwelling formed volumetrically by the superimposition of two elementary volumes, a triangle and a square. The intersection of the geometries generates four elementary functions – entrance, passageway, staircase and living room – which differ from each other in the selection of material, colour and type of lighting.

The House With Clear Shapes And A Complex Entrance has no further divisions other than those resulting from the superimposition of the two volumes. The form of the exterior is translated into the interior and vice versa. All the furnishings are conceived and constructed by Jonas von Ostrowski as independent units, sculptural objects capable of defining space.