Wall*paperwall Ana Araujo, Evangelia Fotsi, Sophie Handler, Aslihan Senel, Willem de Brujin London, Bartlett School of Architecture http://www.bartlett.ucl.ac.uk http://www.geocities.com/wallpaperwall_berlin/

participants

Wall*paperwall. The wall is generally regarded as a main architectural element. It literally defines the architectural space - an interior, as opposed to the outside world. It is stable, settled, untransformable, structural, fundamental. The wallpaper is a minimal, though powerful device for the transformation of this interior space. It is a thin paper surface, as fragile as skin. It is ornamental not structural. It easily deteriorates yet still has the power of bringing something else into the interior in which it is applied. Something which comes from the external world. Other spaces, other times. Images of others. In a way, wallpaper acts like a window. It is a connection to the exterior world, but it is also its opposite as it adds one more layer to the wall that isolates the inside from the outside, reinforcing interiority, providing a sense of privacy. In our project, the interior space in which the wall paper is to be applied is the city of Berlin itself.

In a way, the wallpaper acts like a window. It is a connection to the exterior world. But it is also its opposite, as it adds one more layer to the wall that isolates the inside from the outside, reinforcing interiority, providing a sense of privacy. The wallpaperwall will approach this complex relationship between interior/exterior, the domestic and the urban, the private and the public. An aesthetics of the interface, it will be located on the glass windows, the ultimate border elements, the site where the connection between interior/exterior is most strongly experienced.

The Wall*paperwal is a double-sided intervention, facing both the exterior and the interior of the bikinihaus. a naturalistic graphic pattern, inspired on the wallpapers from the fifties (the time when the bikinihaus was built), will be applied to the exterior, providing an interior-like look to the city. A textual pattern, inspired on inscriptions found in the immediate context, will be applied to the interior, providing an urban look to the exhibition space. moreover, the graphic pattern will spread over some of the columns of the exhibition space, relating both to the image glanced from the exterior and to what one can see from the interior when the windows are opened.

On the first days of the exhibition, the artists will be cutting new “windows” on the wallpaperwall surface by removing bits of the previously applied wallpapers. The actual landscape will be then partially disclosed, lending itself to the continuous process of transformation of the wallpaperwall pattern, at the same time that the original interior/exterior problematic that had given birth to the intervention will be brought back to view.

Biography

The members of the wall*paperwall group are all graduate students at the Bartlett, UCL, London. Sophie Handler and Evangelia Fotsi have attended the Master in Architectural Theory Program in 2002/03. Aslihan Senel and Willem de Bruijn are students from the MPhil/PhD by Theory. Ana Araujo attends the MPhil/PhD by Design. In their project wall*paperwall they deal with the surface of buildings and towns as medium of perception and esthetic experience.