Bau-Stelle

Buildings are designed, then planned and built. The building process, however, usually remains hidden, and pictures in glossy format are only seen of the finished building. Yet it is precisely the building site with its dust, dirt and noise that harbours moments of high aesthetics and artistic quality. With their exhibition in the Raumgalerie, ERNST² ARCHITEKTEN tell of the extraordinary beauty that accompanies their daily work.

Beautiful renderings and animations from the design phase and high-quality architectural photographs of the final building: these are the images one usually sees of buildings. In between, however, there is a phase that is little known. The rawness of the building site, the atmosphere of dust, dirt and noise, flickering neon lights, dirty coffee cups and yellow rubber boots, the smell of concrete and artificial materials that you don't find anywhere else - all this remains mostly unmentioned and untold. With luck, at most hand-shot photos remain, which disappear into the archive after completion. But there is also a high aesthetic inherent in every building process. It always tells the story of creation and transformation, of the energy of progress, the hardness of the materials and the pulsation of the doing, but also of the delicacy of the light, the playful dancing of the shadows and the constant play of forms, lines and textures. To those who allow it, a seemingly ordinary building site reveals an extraordinary beauty.

The exhibition "Bau-Stelle - Die Ästhetik des Tuns" (Construction Site - The Aesthetics of Doing) in the Raumgalerie deals precisely with this intermediate process of construction and shows what makes up the everyday life of the construction site, its functional, sometimes also unaesthetic side. The builders' place of work is either in the construction container or outside, in all winds and weathers. The photographs by the two photographers Simon Gerlinger and Konrad Zerbe take a look at the process of building and the process of transformation. Contrasts emerge between light and darkness, movement and stillness, chaos and order. Real construction site materials and equipment can be explored to experience their tactile, sensory and olfactory side. The second part of the exhibition "Stelle" lets the protagonists have their say, without whom construction would not even be possible, via text and video. The exhibition invites visitors to sharpen their view of building in terms of functional reality and aesthetic appreciation.

The planning office ERNST² ARCHITEKTEN was founded in 1998 by the brothers Markus and Stefan Ernst, and became a public limited company in 2012. Olaf Sachtler has been a member of the board since 2022. A total of 480 employees work at the main office in Stuttgart and currently in 16 branch offices throughout Germany. Across all locations, major projects are successfully realised as new buildings or general refurbishments in Germany in the areas of healthcare, research + teaching, industry, administration, housing and special buildings. The strengths of the planning office lie in the planning and implementation of conversions and refurbishments of large building complexes with a high proportion of technology. Many projects are carried out during ongoing operations. Everyone, the board of directors, the site managers as well as the teams, work according to the same motto: Your project is our project.