Taubman College del Campo and Manninger Exhibit “Sublime Bodies” at the Fab Union Gallery in Shanghai
Taubman College faculty Matias del Campo and Sandra Manninger exhibit “Sublime Bodies,” a collection of works, projects and speculations by SPAN, their architectural practice, at the Fab Union Gallery in Shanghai, China. The exhibition is open to the public March 22 – May 14, 2017.
The exhibition “Sublimes Bodies” presents itself as a collection of projects by del Campo and Manninger outlining the driving forces behind the work of their practice SPAN. From early speculations on the performance of surface and form, to robotic fabrication strategies, to autonomous methodologies, and thoughts on the postdigital age, the exhibition acts as a container for SPAN´s contemplations on the nature of contemporary architecture. In same parts theory, report and collection the exhibition investigates the relationship between historic lineage, philosophical inspiration, technological innovations and its effects on design strategies for the built environment. For SPAN the built environment encompasses a large range of various scales, from the design object to the urban conditions, all of which are bounded by rulesets of mathematics and geometry extracted from nature. The combination of speculative thinking with advanced design sensibilities and a profound curiosity for new technologies is what forms the dense design ecology of SPAN, outlined in this exhibition. SPAN´s work has been described as provocatively abstract, breaking down the building blocks of architecture to its very core and interrogating their position in our contemporary age. Far beyond the creation of objects, architecture for SPAN is as much an intellectual discipline as much as it is mirror for our present, and speculative terrain for future possibilities.
