Interview with Architect Jurgen Mayer H, Berlin

When was your firm set up and what was the driving factor back then? In 1996 I came to Berlin after graduating in Princeton and living in New York for a while, especially to confront a critical architectural education with a quite charged and vivid cultural urban condition. Parallel to establishing a practice, I started teaching, and since then teaching is a major factor in testing the architectural condensations of cultural phenomena. Competitions and smaller art installation projects became the laboratories Take a break and have a look at these awesome products: AD Berger Silk Luxury Emulsion Scratch-resistant, Bio-resistant Paint AD Berger Silk Designzz AD Berger Clean Room Coating make certain assumptions about the production and performance of the architecture operative. Winning the Stadthaus competition in 1996 became the driving factor to set up my own company. We grew very gradually, and now we are a team of about 20 people working on a highly exciting set of projects nationally and internationally. A few words about your philosophy of design? Each projects is a unique research into context and culture, and we always develop individual designs for specific programs, sites and clients. Our architecture is developed during the design process based on a repertoire of strategic explorations that we developed over the years, on pushing limits and being driven by the curiousity for the new. Some conceptual approaches are based on our research by architectural projects and art installations. We look closely at the site, critically rethink the program and try to extract something that is special to the specific site. We establish parameters as a skeleton or framework for each project. These are conceptual conditions rather than design driven compositions, based on a clients brief, contextual references and programmatic logistics. As a designer, how would you define an installation and what is your approach towards installation designs? Our exhibition and installation designs are exploring the subject of presenting projects in a novel manner. The mobile and changeable exhibitions with sculptural elements are engaging one another in spatial dialogue by integrating presentations of various. The order in which the sculptures are set up within the exhibition are deliberately left open, the exhibitors are given a « space for opportunity » allowing for flexible adaptation to unforeseen demands on utilization or changing locations. The exhibition's changeability opens up intriguing constellations and invites the visitor to think over the conventions of customary presentation in a static context while exploring new ways of exhibition presentation. Source:Zingy Homes