This exhibition explores the essential yet often overlooked temporary structures that maintain urban functionality, from construction and maintenance to security. It brings into focus the necessary background elements that blend into the city's fabric, highlighting their lightness, precision, and strength.
The exhibition 'Temporär: Strukturen der Notwendigkeit' delves into the world of temporary utilitarian structures, which form an essential but frequently unnoticed layer of urban infrastructure. These constructions are vital for countless urban processes, including building, demolition, maintenance, guidance, protection, and security. Often labeled as temporary, they seamlessly integrate into their surroundings, typically remaining below the threshold of perception.
The fascination with these ephemeral architectures has been a long-standing interest for KOSMOS architects, the concept and design team behind the exhibition. They have amassed a collection of examples of these structures, which are built for fleeting moments but possess remarkable lightness, precision, and strength. This passion has evolved into a research project that treats temporariness as a distinct architectural category. KOSMOS architects refer to these anonymous technical infrastructures as 'tectures,' signifying a 'constructed self' that exists independently of 'authorial' architecture. The exhibition prompts reflection on what can be learned from these temporary structures, suggesting that their functional, quickly available, and easily assembled/adapted/dismantled nature offers a model for an architecture that can respond immediately to evolving social, economic, political, ecological, technological, and climatic challenges, serving as a laboratory for new ways of dealing with resources, time, and conditions.
