Art in architecture

Laying tracks …

In the Historical Archive of the Archdiocese of Cologne, 2009.

In 2015, the catalog "Less is More" was published with a text by Stefan Kraus and photographs by Lothar Schnepf, published by the Historical Archive of the Archdiocese of Cologne.

In 2009, I received the 1st prize for the artistic design of the reading room and the corridor area of the Historical Archives of the Archdiocese of Cologne. A kind of pathway from the entrance to the reading room was to be developed that takes into account the contents of an archive and the architecture. Outside: The 1950s building impresses with its clarity and unobtrusiveness. I wanted to emphasize this impression with my work. Inside: Via the staircase with its very elegant curve, one reaches the newly designed reading room after two floors. The black-framed stained glass in the hallway is typical of the 50s and 60s. After conversations with the archivists about their work, one sentence particularly stuck with me: "From much comes little." The historians must make forward-looking decisions about which material might be useful in the future. They sift through, evaluate, and discard, or preserve, organize, and describe the collected materials in an inventory. The great responsibility lies in the preemptive interpretation, which can be described as an intervention in the flow of time. From these two core statements, I developed my design and used my artistic language in the different arrangement of lines. Black steel rods of equal length form poetic signs on the path from the entrance area to the reading room. On its front wall is the "clock," whose black "hands" can be turned over the white disc. From the cross symbol in the entrance area and the circular shape of the clock, I developed a sign for the Historical Archive that visually brings together the place and its mission.

 

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