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negotiating ungers. the materiality of the social

an exhibition at civa with students from ku  leuven,  faculty  of  architecture (in collaboration with cornelia  escher)
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1 – the exhibition explores how differing aspects of a materiality of the social come together.

2 – the conceptual, theoretical and compositional features of the oberhausen institute. (image credit: bertrand cavalier)

3 – centered around the building and its in-built behavior and material strategies. (image credit: bertrand cavalier)

4 – architectural ambitions and social and political concerns are focalized at the oberhausen institute. (image credit: bertrand cavalier)

5 – speculative observations (yasaman hedayat, margot schurmans, amber van houdt), interpretation of daily routines in the oberhausen institute . (image credit: bertrand cavalier)

6 – picnic at home (chaoyu huang, cansu koçdemir, ying zhao), visualizing a contemporary materiality of the social. (image credit: bertrand cavalier)

7 – the framing of the gaze and the window in the oberhausen institute (annelien seys, başak işik, robin vleeschouwers), digital windows frame particular views of the outside world. (image credit: bertrand cavalier)

8 – oberhausen institute drawings (oswald mathias ungers), view of the assembly hall, floor plan students‘ room, ground floor plan. (image credit: bertrand cavalier)

9 – niederrhein-kolleg, 2020 (bertrand cavalier), observations on how architecture and social life are intertwined with history. (image credit: bertrand cavalier)

10 – oberhausen institute (reconstructed model), a certain hierarchy of private, group and communal spaces. (image credit: bertrand cavalier)

the oberhausener institut zur erlangung der hochschulreife (today: niederrhein-kolleg) realized by the german architect oswald mathias ungers between 1953 and 1959 is a design for a school that combined a progressive pedagogical approach with a new architectural language. the design followed emancipatory ideas; the spatial arrangement and the material aesthetics of the school were conceived in close dialogue with the desired social processes and structures.

during a summer school in july 2019 at the ungers archiv für architekturwissenschaft (uaa) in cologne, we analyzed the project together with students from the ku leuven, faculty of architecture and the kunstakademie düsseldorf.

the project is used as the starting point to take a new look at both ungers’ work and approaches to sociology in architecture.

following the summer school, nine students decided to continue their work on the subject and to further expand on the ideas developed in the discussions. the results were presented in an exhibition alongside a selection of drawings from the uaa.

students:
yasaman hedayat
darcy huang
başak işik
cansu koçdemir
margot schurmans
annelien seys
amber van houdt
robin vleeschouwers
ying zhao

photography:
bertrand cavalier

with support from: ungers archiv für architekturwissenschaft (uaa)

the design of the exhibition scenography was determined by and executed with materials available from previous exhibitions at civa.

negotiating  ungers. the materiality of the social is the second in a series of international summer school workshops at the uaa. the aim of the workshops is to look at some of ungers’ less well-known projects and to reconsider them in the light of questions emerging out of of todays’ transformational global processes.

negotiating ungers 2. the oberhausen institute and the materiality of the social, book, 2022

last updated November 5, 2024