Sabine Bitter/Helmut Weber: Habitat oder „Wie wir wohnen wollen.“
Factsheet
Format: Art in architecture/Façade installation
Location: 1130 Vienna, Hietzinger Kai 131, former BUWOG Customer and Administrative Centre
Creation: 2016–2017
Artists: Bitter/Weber Collective: Sabine Bitter (*1960 in Aigen, Upper Austria, lives and works in Vienna and Vancouver), Helmut Weber (*1957 in Dorf an der Pram, Upper Austria, lives and works in Vienna), www.lot.at
Info/Scope: Façade design with mesh banner triptych (307 m2) using black and white architectural photographs at the former BUWOG Customer and Administrative Centre, 1130 Vienna
Sabine Bitter/Helmut Weber: Habitat oder „Wie wir wohnen wollen.“ / Habitat, or “How We Want to Live”
Away from the secure art environment, open for any reading or interpretation, the winners of the 2016 Art in Architecture Competition affixed a gigantic piece of wallpaper to the BUWOG Customer and Administrative Centre. The substantively broad examination of architecture, photography, the city and the company’s own slogan Happy Living is a logical fit into Bitter/Weber’s oeuvre. In the context of their examination of urban transformation processes, they brought together two urban situations from architecture and image: the BUWOG façade and photographic black-and-white views of Mosche Safdie’s “Habitat 67”, a residential building for the 1967 Montreal Expo. In the overlapping of photography and façade, Bitter/Weber achieve formal penetration with respect to content and form – the image consistently inscribes itself into the architecture and makes ambivalent relationships between architecture and its photographic representation visible. With their media superimposition, they simultaneously bring the housing question up to date: What do ideas of modernist promises of progress, emancipation and new forms of living, working and dwelling in a city of the many mean on the façade of the BUWOG Customer and Administrative Centre for happy living today?
