KUB Arena
Trix & Robert Haussmann
24 | 01 – 06 | 04 | 2015
KUB Arena’s 2015 program will be inaugurated by an exhibition responding to the features of Peter Zumthor’s space, by Trix and Robert Haussmann, the Zürich duo who are architects, designers, and theorists. Since founding their »Allgemeine Entwurfsanstalt« (General Design Institute) in 1967, they have been questioning the modernist doctrine of continually inventing the new. In their work they turn to architectural and art history, to extract and update historic models. Evading the dictum »form follows function,« their designs pursue a »critical Mannerism,« permitting them to merge the old and the new, to generate dissent and work with ambiguity, contradiction, and chance. By employing illusionism as a means of material alienation and through the optical dissolution of volume through mirroring, they create complex, illusionary, apparently infinite spaces, furniture, and objects, which humorously undermine the canonization of concepts of value and order. Their interior design for the bar of the Kronenhalle (1965) and the Da Capo Bar in Zürich (1970), their scheme for Galleria Hamburg (1978 — 83), and their redesigning of Zürich’s main station (1987 — 91) are legendary. The fabric collections and furniture they have designed, such as the mirrored New Weissenhof-Chair (1988) or the so-called Lehrstück II (1978), meanwhile rank amongst the most important icons of postmodern Swiss design. Lehrstück II is an interpretation of an antique fluted column that disintegrates into individual drawer segments — one of a total of nine Lehrstücke, in which the form is distorted by function, and which may neither be reduced to one nor the other.
For Reflexion und Transparenz the duo was invited to engage with Peter Zumthor’s architecture using their own formal language. Utilizing the basic geometrical grid that structures the Kunsthaus as their point of departure, they will be inscribing the KUB Arena’s coordinates with square mirrors. These mirrors turned at 45 degrees quote the glass elements of the ceilings on KUB’s upper floors, generating a multitude of virtual fissures within the space.
Biography
Trix Haussmann-Högl is an architect BSA SIA. She studied at ETH, the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Zürich, and completed her post-graduate studies at the ORL Institute for Local, Regional and National Planning at ETH, Zürich. Since 1967 she has been running an office in partnership with Robert Haussmann. Until 2002 Trix Haussmann taught at ETH, Zürich.
Robert Haussmann is an architect BSA SIA. After studying in Zürich and Amsterdam he founded his own office, which he has been running in partnership with Trix Haussmann since 1967. Until 1996 he was Professor of Architectural Design at the Staatliche Akademie der bildenden Künste in Stuttgart.
Trix and Robert Haussmann have been active internationally for more than three decades, and in addition to the design, construction, reconstruction, and upgrading of architecture, they also design furniture, textiles, and appliances.