
und so groß is sie gar nich...
verhältnisse schaffe ;)

Albert Einstein
(picture from content management system of cern- photo lab, all rights reserverd) The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is a gigantic scientific instrument near Geneva, where it spans the border between Switzerland and France about 100 m underground. It is a particle accelerator used by physicists to study the smallest known particles – the fundamental building blocks of all things. It will revolutionise our understanding, from the minuscule world deep within atoms to the vastness of the Universe.
Two beams of subatomic particles called 'hadrons' – either protons or lead ions – will travel in opposite directions inside the circular accelerator, gaining energy with every lap. Physicists will use the LHC to recreate the conditions just after the Big Bang, by colliding the two beams head-on at very high energy. Teams of physicists from around the world will analyse the particles created in the collisions using special detectors in a number of experiments dedicated to the LHC.
There are many theories as to what will result from these collisions, but what's for sure is that a brave new world of physics will emerge from the new accelerator, as knowledge in particle physics goes on to describe the workings of the Universe. For decades, the Standard Model of particle physics has served physicists well as a means of understanding the fundamental laws of Nature, but it does not tell the whole story. Only experimental data using the higher energies reached by the LHC can push knowledge forward, challenging those who seek confirmation of established knowledge, and those who dare to dream beyond the paradigm.
Hadronen sind Teilchen, die der starken Wechselwirkung unterworfen sind. Da man sie heute als aus Quarks aufgebaut betrachtet, sind sie im eigentlichen Sinn keine Elementarteilchen. Die bekanntesten Hadronen sind die Nukleonen (Neutronen und Protonen), aus denen die Atomkerne aufgebaut sind.
(following pictures (C) hannebaum seufert jentzen)
| It is tough not to stare at Susy Oliveira’s clunky, 1980s-video-gamish polygon sculptures. Of course, sculpture is created for gawking, so clearly Oliveira has reached at least one of her goals with these large-scale pieces made of color photographic prints (c-prints) on archival card and wrapped onto foam core. Clockwise, these pieces are called Bird on a Log, The Living Boy, Time Is Never Wasted, and The Girl and the Bear. In her description of her 2008 solo show at Toronto’s Peak gallery, Oliveira wrote about examining “our preoccupation with replacing nature with fabricated versions of itself.” Fittingly, she adds that these sculptures express an “opposition between the round aspects of sculpture and the flat aspects of photography, much like bringing a virtual model into a real space.” Oliveira is a graduate of the Ontario College of Art and Design (2000) and the University of Waterloo (2006). - Tuija Seipell |

Frank Barkow und Regine Leibinger haben ihr amerikanisch-deutsches Büro 1993 in Berlin gegründet und seitdem zahlreiche Projekte im In- und Ausland realisiert. Ihre Arbeitsweise ist durch ein beständiges Zusammenwirken von Berufspraxis, Forschung und Lehre geprägt. In ihrer interdisziplinären, diskursiven Arbeitsauffassung erweitert und verfeinert sich das eigene Schaffen durch den Austausch mit Experten aus den Bereichen Energie- und Klimatechnik, Tragwerksplanung, Ausstellungsgestaltung, Landschaftsarchitektur und Kunst.
Die Ausstellung „Atlas of Fabrication“ in den Galerieräumen von 032c in Berlin zeigt eine Auswahl der zuvor im größeren Rahmen in London präsentierten Exponate. Anhand von Materialstudien, Objekten und Modellen wird deutlich, wie sich Forschung, Lehre und Praxis in der Arbeit von Barkow Leibinger überschneiden, inspirieren und wechselseitig beeinflussen.
Ausstellung: 18. April bis 31. Mai 2009
Eröffnung: 18. April 2009, 18 Uhr
Ort: 032c, Kleine Kurstraße 1, 10117 Berlin
Zum Thema:
When I caught up with this year’s Pritzker Architecture Prize winner, Peter Zumthor, last Thursday, I could hear the wind whipping in the background. Zumthor wasn’t in his office, which can be found in the village of Haldenstein in central Switzerland. He was outdoors, meeting with clients for two houses in a little village near Vals, the site of his best-known project, the Thermal Baths.
He was talking on his cell phone and he quickly made me, a Midwestern flatlander, very jealous with his description of his surroundings:
I’m out here on the mountainside high in the Swiss Alps. High up. I’m looking at a beautiful chain of mountains. Blue sky. You should be here.
Indeed I should....Let’s tell non-architects about you. Tell me about your office.
This office is in the Swiss Alps and we are 20 people from six or seven nations. It’s a limited number of people—not more than 20 because we’re working in a familiar kind of situation, like in a farmsted in a village. We have a couple of buildings devoted to me and that is where we are working. Life and working are closely connected.
Compared to many of today’s "starchitects," you’ve taken an unconventional career path. Do you feel vindicated by this award?
Oh yes, it’s great that you can sort of pursue your thing. Do your thing. It gets recognized. I’m not so keen on publishing. I’m not a networker. It’s great that if you do good work, it gets recognized.
When you were studying at the Pratt Institute in New York in the 1960s, did you visit Chicago?
I did. I looked at the work of Mies. I went to IIT (Crown Hall, at left). And then I took a tour through all the famous buildings of the pioneers of the city...I respect Mies a lot.
You have said, "Architecture is not a vehicle or a symbol for things that do not belong to its essence. In a society that celebrates the inessential, architecture can put up a resistance, counteract the waste of forms and meanings and speak its own language." That’s beautifully put, but I want to go deeper. I’m sorry to ask you to answer this on a cellphone, but how would you define the essence of architecture?
I guess it's to do rooms or spaces for people. If you look at the Earth without architecture, it’s sometimes a little bit unpleasant. So there is this basic human need to do shelter in the broadest sense of the word, whether it’s a movie theater or a simple log cabin in the mountains. This is the core of architecture: To provide a space for human beings.
You’ve said you are interested in making places, not just objects. How do the Vals Thermal Baths (left) illustrate that?
It’s actually built on the site where there is a hot spring. So the water comes out of the mountain right there. I built the whole thing out a local stone which we quarry half a kilometer back in the valley. The building material and the site and the hot water—it’s all there. I have to give it a shape.
It sounds like you don’t work with many clients who come do you? Do you reject most of them?
True.
Why?
I think my work is about authorship. It’s less about rendering a service and even less about implementing ideas of other people. I need a close contact to the client whoever it is and a commitment of the client to go out and do a process together. I want to do the best for him. I need his respect and his patience. I want to work with a sophisticated person who’s interested in a good building and not in my name.
What lessons does this award teach young architects?
I would hope that it would teach them that you can carefully do your thing, that you can be yourself, that you can try to solve the problem, that you can concentrate on the essence of your task, that you don’t have to do what other people expect of you. There is still a real need for good quality architecture, not paper architecture, but the real stuff.