Megazeichen

1990

Over a total period of six weeks, the lights remained on at night in certain offices and corridors of the Mannesmann high-rise, so that the illuminated windows in the constellation formed a widely visible sign. The light appearances changed weekly on the multi-storey façade of the building, and the systematic overall program only became clear as the campaign progressed.

Mischa Kuball's concept for his Düsseldorf Mannesmann project is based on simple premises: A high-rise building, whose functional constraints are already evident in its austere and simple external form, becomes the carrier of artistic signs for a temporary period, which the artist plans in his studio and implements with the help of modern technologies. The artist leaves the building its everyday function as a workplace; art conquers the exterior of the building only during the non-working hours, when it is nothing more than an empty shell, a congealed form of work and life processes that can never communicate itself through the appearance of the building. Kuball separates working time and art time, using the social rhythms of urban life for his intervention in the nocturnal darkness of undefined cities. Kuball defines the transitions between times as fluid: with the times of day, employees leave and enter the building, take up and finish their work. Those who sit and work in the building cannot perceive its appearance; those who see the building in its outer form have no insight into the inner life of its functions. The artist is the first to deal with the dilemma of a seemingly hierarchy-free modernist architecture formulated in this way. In his treatment of the building, it is reduced to its sculptural physical form. Architecture becomes sculpture where it is stripped of its usability.

Kuball's project traces the manifestations of the dual existence of public space. Day and night, working time and art time: the dual rhythms make it clear how closely the artist is oriented to the course of nature and how precisely he reflects the natural conditions of social systems of order. Feierabend and Arbeitszeit refer the altered perception of the building as a sculpture to leisure time, a time that is regarded in our society as particularly rich and conducive to personal realization. Kuball insists on this antinomy, which becomes the structuring principle and pacemaker for his project. Kuball insists on this antinomy, which becomes the structuring principle and pacemaker for his project. The users of the building - the working people - lead the high-rise into art time when they leave their workplace: in the artist's concept, they become the ones who produce art time, who start and end it. A second temporal rhythm lies in the weekly changing form of the architectural signs. The week as a superordinate unit of time in urban life combines endings and new beginnings and is also closely linked to the natural chronology of our lives, containing repetitions (such as day and night, light and dark, working hours and leisure time) and changes (the course of the seasons).