Taste is the lack of appetite

Patricia Parinejad

TASTE IS THE LACK OF APPETITE - HYBRID APPROACHES TO ARCHITECTURE

• 建築家

Taste Is the Lack of Appetite is an exhibition on the occasion of the 25th anniversary of GRAFT and celebrates the curiosity for the special, the unique, and the unexpected.

photo_credit Patricia Parinejad — Patricia Parinejad

‘Taste is the lack of appetite’, Dave Hickey, art critic and friend of the firm once said, expressing that, especially in creative work, the insistence on principles of taste is inferior to an appetite arising born of curiosity.This sentence has become a guideline for GRAFT’s work, since especially at a time of crises, the team strives to confront challenges with curiosity and passion, an open spirit, and without the preconceived canon of a specific architectural language. Even under difficult conditions, what interests GRAFT is sounding out the open spaces of the experimental and the creative and unflinchingly posing questions: regarding the quality and beauty of architecture, regarding the value of intelligent solutions, and regarding heterogeneity and the importance of innovation.

The exhibition presents GRAFT projects that have already been realised as well as ones still under construction, along with one important unrealised design – for which the firm was awarded first prize in the international competition for the Jewish Museum in Moscow. All the projects feature an aspect that would be unexpected and radical in the given context and propels the narrative of the respective building task.

The first room of the exhibition is dedicated to the Solarkiosk, which, as a contemporarily designed intervention in remote regions of Africa, ensures a supply of energy, connectivity, and communication by means of clean solar energy and a sustainable, post-colonial social model. In the second room of the exhibition, six different buildings are presented in an exemplary way, reduced to their core message, by means of large-format models. The projects – new buildings and revitalisations in the historical context – are concrete results of the abstract design strategies of Lofting, Tracing, Voxelization, Sectioning, Weaving and Carving.

Projects:

- A LASKA, twin office buildings at Ostkreuz in Berlin, DE, currently being realised

- Conversion and expansion of the oldest Jugendherberge (youth hostel) in Germany, Munich, DE, 2023

- BRICKS, revitalisation of an historical post office area in the district of Berlin- Schöneberg, DE, 2021
Charlie Living, residential district at Checkpoint Charlie, Berlin, DE, 2020

- Wave, two residential buildings on the River Spree, Berlin, DE, 2019

- Jewish Museum, conversion of the Bakhmetevsky bus garage designed by Konstantin Melnikov, Moscow, RU, 2007 (unrealised)

Project Team

GRAFT Curators: Sven Fuchs, Lars Krückeberg, Wolfram Putz, Georg Schmidthals, Thomas Willemeit

Aedes Curators: Dr. h.c. Kristin Feireiss, Hans-Jürgen Commerell, Mathias Schnell

Project management: Maria Ludewig, Nora Zerelli

Project team catalog

Publisher: Kristin Feireiss and Hans-Jürgen Commerell, Aedes Architecture Forum
Managing editor: Alma Grossen
Team: Maria Ludewig, Julia Metzger
Texts by: Sven Fuchs, Lars Krückeberg, Wolfram Putz, Georg Schmidthals,
Thomas Willemeit, Alma Grossen
Graphic design: GRAFT Brandlab; Prof. Nikolaus Hafermaas, Harold Kohn
Prepress, Typesetting: Proxi Design; Christian Schärmer, Reinhard Steger
Translation: Gareth Davies
Printing: Europrint Medien GmbH, Berlin