Dead Ringers, work exhibited in 100 Experiments, group show at Aedes Architecture Forum, Berlin

Other - Exhibition, 2019

Dead Ringers is a study of Stockholm’s smallest public buildings – like phone booths, public restrooms and photo kiosks. These kinds of public spaces are a current concern simply because they are becoming extinct. Some, like phone booths, are rapidly being removed because of technological shifts. Others are threatened because they are at odds with prevailing ideals for public spaces, like transparency and openness. Dead Ringers critically turns this tendency into new opportunities. It proposes to selectively replace removed booths with mysterious near-copies that provide similar types of enclosed public spaces, without the narrow functional focus of phone and photo booths. Most if not all of Stockholm’s urban booths are immediately recognizable as small figures in the urban fabric. At the turn of the last century some models featured shingle clad pitched roofs and slender legs, while more recent ones are monolithic, rectilinear volumes made from formed metal panels. What ties them together, despite stylistic differences, is the fact that they all have been shaped after the human body. Their anthropomorphic features include vertical proportions, symmetry, and a clear division into base, enclosure and roof. Each proposed Dead Ringer samples and tweaks these ideal proportions and perfect symmetries of historical booths, recasting them as imperfect and multivalent individuals.

Curatorial statement by Anna Butele:
Inspiration is a driving force in creative design processes. In architecture, it provides important impulses for the development of concepts and approaches, often in unexpected and unforeseeable ways. Latvian designer Anna Butele, of studio Annvil in Riga explores the notion of inspiration in a levitating installation: 100 works materialize from a collaborative experimental project. Drawings, graphics, photographs, and models by renowned architects from 28 countries form a chain—each contribution is a reaction inspired by the previous work. Personal statements by the architects themselves frame the exhibition installation, allowing the audience to immerse itself in the inspirational impulses essential to creative work processes.