Milano Design Week. Towers installation
On 11th of April the INTERNI magazine annual art installations exhibition kicked off. This year the theme is Open Borders. Russian architects Sergei Tchoban and Sergey Kuznetsov, invited for a fifth time to participate in this show, have created the interactive sculptural arrangement Towers for the exhibition (together with Agnia Sterligova, Planeta 9).
Towers is a 12-meter-high cylindrical volume installed in the center of the main courtyard of the University of Milan. The tower that is in front of us effectively is rather a prototype of a tower because of its extremely laconic, even abrupt form. It is a kind of rough workpiece serving as a starting point for reflecting on the nature of architecture and the role of man-made dominants in landscapes. The entire surface of the structure is worked out as a media facade assembled from 336 tightly-fitting to one another LED screens that serve as an interactive canvas for architectural graphics.
Some of the images were chosen and applied in advance - these are drawings by Sergei Tchoban and Sergey Kuznetsov, wherein out of all their works the architects selected fragments with vertical structures - from historical campaniles and bell towers to modern skyscrapers. The images are not static but gradually appear on the surface, as if the unseen hand of the author creates the drawing right in front of us. Other towers can also be drawn by the visitors themselves utilizing the tablets and styluses installed in the four corners of the main courtyard. In such a way, in front of our eyes the structure transforms from an abstract cylinder into a drawing laboratory, in which new variations of the same architectural form are created without end, and the visitors get a chance to feel like co-creators.
Sergei Tchoban and Sergey Kuznetsov are convinced that it is precisely drawing that is the ideal means of professional liberation, creativity and dialogue which is capable of opening any and all borders. The combination of bright colors selected for the background “canvas” - turquoise and pink, orange and yellow, yellow and blue - make the drawings stand out more.
