OFF-GRID DIALOGUES
Three public lectures
Year: 2025
Location: Academy of Fine Arts, Vienna
Client: Institute for Art and Architecture
Status: Realised event
Participants: Anupama Kundoo (DE), Maria Lisogorskaya (UK), James Taylor-Foster (SE), Olaf Grawert (DE), Theo Deutinger (AT), Tom Schoonjans (BE)
Curators: Anastassia Smirnova-Berlin / Alexander Sverdlov
The lecture series titled OFF GRID brought together design practitioners from various generations and cultural contexts who are interested in the next demarcation of their professional field. They demonstrate that architecture could be understood very broadly – also as curatorship, heritage preservation, social design or research – and, at the same time, propagate the power of architectural system thinking. In their visionary pursuits, aesthetics often turn out to be a function of systematisation, while formal excellency becomes a byproduct of criticality.
The term grid is central to all conversations. It serves as a metaphor for all those well-established, often rigid structures of the past – built and intangible – that can be updated, rethought or abandoned altogether in response to the major planetary issues. Going off-grid therefore means developing concepts with an alternative logic and proposing solutions that imply disconnection from, or at least a critique of, centrally governed matrices.
Programme
15 April
Session 1: Communal Material
> Anupama Kundoo/AK architects, Berlin
> Maria Lisogorskaya/Assemble, London
6 May
Session 2: (No) Rules
> James Taylor-Foster/ArkDes, Stockholm
> Olaf Grawert/bplus.xyz, Berlin
27 May
Session 3: Deconstructing Modernity
> Theo Deutinger/TD architects, Vienna
> Tom Schoonjans/ROTOR, Brussels