curated by the Alanus Hochschule für Kunst und Gesellschaft
Johannes Hoffmann, Maximilian Bentler and Daryan Knoblauch, three former architecture students from the Alanus College of Art and Society, are addressing the housing issue in their exhibition “Coherent Existence”. Growing cities lack a center-near area for quality living space and meanwhile pushes the shoe everywhere. With their urban and progressive experiments, they question conventional approaches to living. In the sense of a welfare-oriented society, the trio transfers ideas of the “sharing economy” to urban space: fewer private spaces, multiple uses or the dissolution of property boundaries are packaged in different scenarios. Within Cologne, various places have been selected that serve as a starting point for their experimental attempts to live. In addition to a parking lot or an allotment garden, one of the vacant railway arches in the Hüttenstraße in Cologne-Ehrenfeld was used as a projection screen for a new typology of housing. The exhibition and publication were developed as part of their bachelor thesis, which was awarded the BDA Masters in 2018 by the Bund Deutscher Architekten Nordrhein-Westfalen. The exhibition “Coherent Existence” will once again be screened for the CityLeaks Urban Art Festival in one of the railway arcs in Hüttenstraße. In doing so, she enters into a dialogue with the artist group “Pferde im Raum” (Horses in Space), which pick up and reflect on the subject of living with their artistic-performative interventions.