InsideOutside
Just three months ago during the summer of 2019, an exhibition at Berlin’s Architekturgalerie sent the city a conspicuous signal. The installation InsideOutside by the architecture office :mlzd consisted of a tribune, whose bright red steps extended from the back wall of the gallery - penetrating through the storefront - towards the Karl-Marx-Allee. In doing so, the architecture office staged and alienated a recurring motif encountered in many of its recent projects.
Whenever the audience bent down from up under the ceiling, whenever they flattened their noses on the storefront further down or whenever when passing by they sat down on the steps at the sidewalk and browsed through the newspaper, taken from the vending machine, full of buildings by the architecture office. These were the moments when the architectural object invited to examine space and atmosphere, setting free a playful, surreal and absurd potential and generating a small reality of its own within the monumental urban space of East Berlin.
But this object was much more than only a playground for surreal space experiences: it understood itself as an antithesis and manifesto of a new condition of the public space, which suffers under the devaluation by private acts of self-staging and event culture, the loss of meaning through virtualization and its impoverishment caused by norms and regulations.