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Swiss Art Awards, Installation Anthropomorphic Form
Basel, 2019–2021
Competition, 2019, 1. Prize
Photo: Taiyo Onorato and Nico Krebs
Photo: Taiyo Onorato and Nico Krebs
Photo: EMI

The textile ceiling of the installation Anthropomorphic Form was conceived for the Swiss Art Awards 2021 exhibition and took up the entire exhibition hall, the room-filling work transformed into a new architectural space. It called to mind the temporary structures of festival tents, although this impression was instantly subverted by the continuously varying shape taken on by the fabric.

The translucent fabric was suspended from thin cables aligned along five axes, with each cable raised and lowered by one of forty-two motors. The motors were controlled by an algorithm that responded to different parameters of human and atmospheric activity: the noise level, the number of visitors and their distribution, the speed of their movements, etc.

The textile roof thus became an actual organ of the visitors in attendance and, operating almost unnoticed, continually formed other spaces as a backdrop for the exhibition – sometimes taking on a monumental guise, sometimes seeming intimate, sometimes appearing architectonic and at other times organic. The fabric formed an archaic tent roof or wrapped those present in a mimetic cloud.

The work thereby addresses the impact that humans have on the environment in which we move about and also questions traditionally static architecture in a subtle commentary on our age of the Anthropocene.

Competition team
Ron Edelaar, Elli Mosayebi, Christian Inderbitzin, Lukas Burkhart, Yosuke Nakamoto

Project team
Ron Edelaar, Elli Mosayebi, Christian Inderbitzin, Lukas Burkhart, Michael Stirnemann, Kevin Dröscher, Yosuke Nakamoto, Anna Clocchiatti, Roxane Unterberger

Collaboration
Fabian Bircher, Zurich

Client
Federal Office of Culture, Bern

Civil Engineer: Davide Tanadini, Zurich
Textile Production: Robert Meyknecht, geo – Die Luftwerker, Lübeck

Publication
www.hochparterre.ch, 6.11.2021
www.swiss-architects.com, 13.6.2019
www.nzz.ch, 11.6.2019
www.hochparterre.ch, 11.6.2019