Can art in architecture poeticize the character of a building? Can it transcend the function of a room? And what effect do pictures, words, or literary texts have on us if they become a part of our everyday environment?
In her design for the new main building for Sparkasse Allgäu in Kempten planned by Auer + Weber, the Berlin artist Brigitte Waldach draws on nature as a landscape of ideas. History and stories—reflected through literary texts—are literally inscribed across four floors of the building. One can read text fragments by Friedrich Nietzsche, Ingeborg Bachmann, Heiner Müller and Durs Grünbein on glass dividing walls. In the conference rooms, on the other hand, prose texts by Peter Handke form veritable writing clouds—a dense text matrix that makes it possible to experience the relationship from the center to the periphery, from inside to outside.
By means of the QR code in the center of the book, one can also listen to the texts, read by the artist herself.
Photographs: Hansgeorg Schöner
