Five photographs of windows, at a scale of 1:1, transpose the viewer from the Architektur Galerie Berlin to the Multigenerational House in Binningen, which was designed in 2013 by Basel-based Luca Selva Architekten. As part of the photography, the edges of the exhibition images are defined by the Multigenerational House’s own bronze window frames. The portrayed views onto the city of Basel, the park-like garden, and neighboring buildings (evident in the manner of cropped images) enter into a surprising dialogue with the Architektur Galerie Berlin’s vista onto the Karl-Marx-Allee. The title of the exhibition–Eight Windows–itself explains how the gallery’s own three showcase windows are an integral part of the installation.
Just as the expansive views outdoors condense on the pictorial plane of the photographs–as on the retina–, through the mirroring effect of the large format windowpanes, the interiors of the Multigenerational House are also present in the respective images. The simultaneous display of outer and inner worlds in the images is further overlaid by the reflection of the gallery visitor upon the glass panes mounted over each photograph. Here, reflection also takes place in a figurative sense: the world of things and appearances encounters the world of thought. The physically tangible can be grasped intellectually, associations are invoked, the horizon is widened. Basic phenomena of architecture are made visible, e.g., the question of different scales; the interaction of urban and interior space; the role of the user; the juxtaposition of nature and the built environment as well as of the organic and the geometric; the subject of steering the gaze and movement; dimensioning and proportioning of rooms; the alternation of a place and its history; and, broadly speaking, the connection of past and present.