Polytope - lights of the avantgarde
Stark, Gabor (2014) Polytope - lights of the avantgarde. [Architecture, Sculpture]
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'Polytope - lights of the avantgarde' is a shortlisted project in the international design competition: WORLDS OF EL LISSITZKY (stage 2), organised by the Siberian Center for Contemporary Arts and the Siberian Center for the Promotion of Architecture in Novosibirsk, Russia
2014 (final jury decision in 2015).
Throughout his peripatetic life, El Lissitzky formed trans-disciplinary collaborations and close artistic friendships with the international vanguard of his time. He and his wife, the art historian Sophie Lissitzky-Kueppers, exchanged ideas with their contemporaries from the fields of the visual arts, architecture, literature, theatre and film. The project pays tribute to these, biographical as well as geographical interrelationships between the Russian and the Western European avant-garde of the early twentieth century.
The spatial configuration of the object consists of a faceted form that defines an accessible cubic space. Via the topological manipulations of shifts and rotations the original figure of a tesseract, the mathematical representation of a four-dimensional cube, is transformed into a complex polyhedron with multiple orientations.
The two facing walls of the framed space are equipped with infrared light and heat sources. They illuminate the object from within and radiate warmth during the wintertime. The light boxes list the names of the selected protagonists of the avant-garde and register the key stations of their respective paths of lives.
Placed next to the Globus Theatre the object's position mediates between the different contexts of the site. In conjunction with the expanded hard landscaping and the reconstructed reflective pool it transforms the plateau into a civic stage for cultural events and performances. Polytope marks a local public place in the heart of Novosibirsk and at the same time pays homage to the wider worlds of El Lissitzky's cosmopolitan network of people and places.
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