Heroic Failures

摘要

On the eve of an exhibition showcasing the work of Office Kersten Geers David van Severen, Ellis Woodman looks at the practice's preoccupation with an architecture uninhibited by function, context and ideology.rnThe governing theme of last year's Venice Bien-nale-Out There: Architecture Beyond Building-was founded on a heady premise: that liberation from the obligation to make physical interventions in the world might afford the architect new and radical means of engaging with it.rnIf the exhibition was intended as a means of testing this assumption, it succeeded all too well in comprehensively disproving it. Removed from their usual sphere of operation, the participants soon retreated either into the territory of urban sociology or the comforts of gestural and entirely ineffectual form making.