René Schäffer

Concept

The balconies of prefab housing blocks are tiny allotments in the grid of contemporary architecture. In formally delimited space, they offer the opportunity to find a comparably aesthetic-substantive situation.

Balconies illustrate the transition between indoors and outdoors. They are both abstract and standardised in their basic characteristics, yet express individualism in the ways they are utilised. This field simultaneously embraces architecture and interior design. It makes it possible to show the relationship of intimacy to facade at the same time.

Embedded and landlocked between the conflicting priorities of outward expression and self-perception, this leads to the creation of material objects of study that reveal contemporary Zeitgeist in concrete urbanity. From art to economics and back.

Since suprematism, constructivism and Bauhaus, ornamentation has frowned on. Artists and designers of these movements refuse to employ such decorative elements and create purposeful, plain and simple design.

Now, after almost exactly 100 years, the Utopia of these visionaries is our reality. I take this normality as an opportunity for my artistic search for the visual proof of the effects of these ideas on contemporary reality.

The aim of this work is the creation of a perceivable, sensual and aesthetic fabric of interrelationships: humanity - idea - architecture - individual - comparability.

The outcome is a group of views of prefab balconies in a formally strict framework that documents the coarse and fine differences in the creative utilisation of the balconies of modern buildings and how they permit visual conclusions to be made about sociological structures of this day and age.