Television towers. 8,559 meters of politics and architecture

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Television towers. 8,559 meters of politics and architecture was the title of an exhibition that ran from October 3, 2009 to March 14, 2010 in the German Architecture Museum in Frankfurt am Main . The cultural exhibition with an architectural background dealt primarily with the social and political context of the television towers . It is considered to be the largest symbolic exhibition of exhibits relating to these structures to date. An exhibition of the same name, accompanying appeared in September 2009 Catalog Book . From July 16 to September 18, 2010 the exhibition under the title aut.raumproduction.shared in the Kunstforum Aut. Architecture and Tyrol shown in Innsbruck .

exhibition

After a media presentation on October 1, 2009, the exhibition opened on October 2 at 7 p.m. on the evening before the first day of the exhibition.

The exhibition took place on the 1st floor of the Architecture Museum in Frankfurt and showed around 250 exhibits on turntables, white shelves made of Styrofoam panels and type cases . In addition to several stands stocked with TV tower postcards, video installations on the topic were also shown. The center of the exhibition space was a cuboid, separate room that presented the exhibits. The walls of the exhibition room were covered with large wallpaper posters showing the tower silhouettes and providing brief information that can also be found in the catalog. Laszo Toffel created the graphic design for the exhibition.

The exhibition could be viewed during the museum's opening hours. Guided tours were offered on Saturday and Sunday at 2 p.m. The exhibition should originally have lasted until January 31, 2010 and has been extended to March 14, 2010.

The exhibition was curated by Friedrich von Borries , Matthias Böttger and Florian Heilmeyer. The coordinating curator at the Architekturmuseum was Oliver Elser. In addition, the 272-page German-English catalog of the same name was published in September 2009.

The exhibition and catalog were sponsored by the German radio tower .

content

The exhibition, developed by students from the Karlsruhe University of Design , dealt with the architecture of television towers and how they are embedded in social and political-historical contexts. Von Borries stated as one of the initial theses of the exhibition:

"No other type of building was so politically charged in the second half of the 20th century as the new type of television tower."

The exhibition showed various objects on which television towers are depicted. In addition to models and miniatures made of plush , plastic and metal, postage stamps, cocktail mixers, cheese skewers, bedside lamps, toilet brushes, liquor bottles, pens, snow globes, puzzles, candles and other souvenirs as well as some curious objects that represent television towers were shown. The exhibition deliberately dispensed with floor plans, structural details and the technical and architectural history of these buildings.

The subtitle of the exhibition 8,559 meters Politics and Architecture refers to the total individual heights of the 25 television tower structures, of which the exhibition focuses on their structural, but above all political history and their integration into society. The exhibition dealt with the following towers, sorted chronologically according to the start of construction:

  1. ↑ The height information corresponds to those in the exhibition and the book and sometimes varied by a few meters compared to the actual height information.
  2. ↑ The Yekaterinburg television tower was never completed; a stump 220 meters high remained from it. The projected height was 440 meters.
  3. ↑ The Jakarta Tower, begun in 1997, was not completed either. The construction work is suspended, but has not yet been officially declared over.
  • Selection of the towers dealt with in the exhibition

  • Tokyo Tower

  • Brasília TV tower

  • CN Tower

  • Tashkent TV tower

Reception and criticism

The internationally acclaimed exhibition met with a largely positive response. The German-Architects network from Stuttgart judged that strolling through the exhibition is fun and, thanks to the many new impressions, brings a different view of television towers. Not least because of profound anecdotes, which are also interesting for non-architects, an understanding is built up apart from technical language, according to the Berliner Morgenpost in an article at the opening of the exhibition. The research trip by Böttger, Heilmeyer and von Borries brought knowledge to light and the exhibition book in particular was an excellently prepared compendium, according to the magazine Album, which belongs to the Wiener Standard .

On the other hand, a reviewer in the design report states that the exhibition is a valid approach for the iconographic meaning, and notes that the objects on display are an amusing foray. However, most of the exhibits dealt too superficially with the initial thesis and only reflect a small part of the book. The mixing of different approaches is also viewed critically. How the building task for “political architecture” was instrumentalized and whether a typology of corresponding tower structures could be developed remained unanswered questions. The catalog book is kept too short in terms of texts, too inflated with images and there is a lack of comprehensible evidence and sources. The most painful shortcoming is that the accumulation of many details, individual phenomena and stories has no résumé.

literature

  • Friedrich von Borries, Matthias Böttger, Florian Heilmeyer: TV towers. 8,559 meters of politics and architecture. Jovis Verlag, 2009, ISBN 978-3-86859-024-1 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Description and pictures of the exhibition 8,559 meters in politics and architecture , accessed on August 30, 2013
  2. ↑ Frankfurt: In the Architectural Museum, large symbolic show of television towers around the world , accessed on August 30, 2013
  3. ↑ aut.raumproduction.transmit , accessed on August 30, 2013
  4. ↑ architekten24.de: exhibition television towers , accessed on August 30, 2013
  5. ↑ The TV tower exhibition on Laszo Toffel's website , accessed on August 30, 2013
  6. ↑ TV towers. 8,559 meters in politics and architecture - exhibition review by the German Architecture Museum, accessed on August 30, 2013
  7. ↑ friedrichvonborries.de: Exhibition in the Deutsches Architekturmuseum (DAM) Frankfurt, 2009 ( memento from September 26, 2013 in the Internet Archive ), accessed on August 30, 2013
  8. ↑ TV towers. 8,559 meters of politics and architecture at Jovis Verlag ( Memento from September 29, 2013 in the Internet Archive )
  9. ↑ TV towers. 8,559 meters of politics and architecture. P 271
  10. ^ TV tower exhibition architecture for DAM ( Memento of October 3, 2013 in the Internet Archive ), accessed on August 30, 2013
  11. ↑ 8,559 meters in politics and architecture on museumsportal.de ( memento from September 27, 2013 in the Internet Archive ), accessed on August 30, 2013
  12. ↑ Der Tagesspiegel : On broadcast , article by Falk Jaeger from October 19, 2009, accessed on August 30, 2013
  13. ^ Reactions to the book and exhibition ( Memento from September 3, 2013 in the Internet Archive ), accessed on August 30, 2013
  14. ↑ Kai-Uwe Scholz: Book review on television towers. 8,559 meters of politics and architecture. ( Memento of September 27, 2013 in the Internet Archive ) 2/2010, accessed on August 30, 2013