“Communal Spaces/Community Places/Common Rooms”
by An Architektur
common room 2
New York City
June 12-July 20, 2007
If there were an award for communicating the highest-minded concepts with the lowest-key materials, this show would win hands down. It consists of little more than some printed papers mounted on the lobby walls of a down-at-the-heels office building on the Lower East Side. Yet the raison d’être of the show—which documents proposals for successful communal, if not utopian living spaces—is the premise that a better future awaits.
The architectural collective Common Room (located in an office upstairs) has curated with a less-is-more approach. The group simply translated selections from a single 2003 issue of the German political-architectural journal An Architektur into English, made one or two modifications, and then stuck the results (and related images) to the walls. The text is dense, and the illustrations more so, yet the show is inspiring...
