modernist inversion
Inversion of a modernist projection booth.
Developed as part of an exhibition in Künstlerhaus Sootbörn, a listed modernist secondary school in Hamburg, this parasitic intervention inverts the relationship between the projection’s origin and its receiving space by reverse-projecting into rather than out of the projection booth. The projection booth occupies the threshold between the extraordinary foyer and the lecture hall and is, as appropriate to the technological fascination of early modernism, positioned at the absolute node of the building’s floor plan. The architects, the brothers Langloh, were students of Walter Gropius and adopted his notion of a topological inversion of the landscape, which he had implemented in the Bauhaus building in Dessau, in a more technologically explicit way. Jakob Klenke, the chroreographer who supposedly used to be the school’s janitor in the 1930’s and to whom the exhibition at Sootbörn was dedicated, is perhaps another missing link between these two buildings.