Gerwald Rockenschaub: Look – Wohnen & Staunen

Factsheet

Format: Art in architecture/Concept art

Location: 1110 Vienna, Kaiser-Ebersdorfer-Straße 35–37

Architecture: Gert M. Mayr-Keber

Creation: 2006

Artist: Gerwald Rockenschaub (*1952 in Linz, lives and works in Berlin), www.instagram.com/g.rockenschaub/

Info/Scope: Façade design using a signifying colour code for the 26-apartment residential building.

Gerwald Rockenschaub: Look – Wohnen & Staunen

Gerwald Rockenschaub – a participant in the Venice Biennale – plays with the projecting corner risalits in the façade design for the residential building in Vienna Simmering (architecture: Gert M. Mayr-Keber) and joins them together with coloured brackets made of powder-coated metal plating. The artist comes up with his designs and tries them out in the virtual 3D space of an architecture programme “until an individually ideal blend of colour is found”. It’s about variation, a playful submission to behold and the dynamisation of the space, comparable to the beats of a musical rhythm. Gerwald Rockenschaub uses the principle of reduction and the ambivalence between abstract and representational to lay trails that we can read and discover. “Colourful always works,” he says – whether in the white cube of the exhibition space or as a signifying colour code that lends the gleaming white architectural shell a unique identity.

In 2006 the residential complex won the Austrian Builders’ Award.

1/2