2024

öffentlich zugänglich

Haus für Kinder, Quiddestraße 1, 81735 München

Lärche, Schichtplatte, Farbe, circa 40 m x 9 m x 0,2 m

Architecture: LMJD Dennerle Motzet Architekten, München

Landscape architecture: Büro Freiraum Berger Fuchs Landschaftsarchitekten, Freising

Photos: Henning Koepke

Text: Julienne Lorz

Although the daycare center in Quiddestrasse is brand new, a few giant creatures have already taken up residence on its façade. Five, to be precise, large “Blobs” of various colors gaze curiously at their surrounding – all but one, that is, who looks rather sleepy…Their names are Tilia, Carpinus, Betula, Quercus and Prunus. These creatures form the daily welcoming committee for the children and their parents, while also being the center’s guardians and mascot. No one can get past them without their taking notice.

In a harmonious interplay with the architecture, artist Benedikt Hipp (*1977, Munich) employs his “Blobs” to cover the entire width of the daycare center’s wooden façade. Five individual, large-format, biomorphic shapes made of wooden slats with cartoon-like eyes are lined up next to each other along the building’s facade. Individually colored – olive green, light blue, purple, dark blue and burgundy – they keep watch as a hybrid of image and sculpture, mutating into a background and image carrier.

Hipp’s execution and design of the “Blobs (Tilia, Carpinus, Betula, Quercus, Prunus)” is evident in the work’s title. These names are derived from the Latin names of five trees that populate the daycare site: Tilia intermedia = Dutch lime; Carpinus betulus = hornbeam; Betula pendula = birch; Quercus robur = oak; and Prunus avium = bird cherry. The artist used the seeds of these trees as his inspiration, abstracting and stylizing them into individualists by giving each unique characteristics.

In a figurative sense, Hipp demonstrates how each tree has its own history, a history that can be read from the way it has grown, as well as from its leaves and bark. In their diversity, the individual trees are in constant communication with each other and the other organisms and creatures around them. The botanist Stefano Mancuso speaks of the “intelligence of plants” and how together they form a functioning ecosystem. In analogy to society, the trees represent individual people who live together in symbiosis and solidarity with one another through community. Hipp describes this as an “emergent system,” by which he means that different, singular elements interact and constantly change to potentially create something new.

Furthermore, by using the tree seed as his inspiration, Hipp clearly underpins the core function of a daycare center: to provide children with a fertile and safe environment where they can be inspired, learn, grow and thrive. The children are also the main users of the building and, as such, the reason for Hipp’s decision to animate the Blobs through the graphic, humorous language of the cartoon. Children should feel addressed and be able to identify with their building.

The components of this art in architecture project – the language of forms and materials, their correlations and interaction with nature – are intrinsic to Hipp’s artistic practice. For example, the artist explores human figures that merge into the amorphous in his technically adept paintings on wood and his archaic-looking ceramics. Hipp places both elements – the painted figure and the clay object – in an often stage-like, spatial relationship, whereby the support and display element are of equal value. Individual body parts, including hand, fee or even eyes, are recurring motifs in his work, and a result of Hipp’s interest in votive offerings, their rituals and the underlying belief systems. More recently Hipp has increasingly focused on plants and the cycles of nature. Decisive for this development was Hipp’s time at the Villa Massimo in Rome, where he worked with the natural resources on site and brought art into connection with ecology and (bio-) diversity – an exploration out of which this art in architecture project was conceived and later further developed and realized.

With “Blobs (Tilia, Carpinus, Betula, Quercus, Prunus)”, Hipp transfers his artistic explorations to a different stage, that of the architecture of an urban facility with a discerning public. This art in architecture project has the potential to set a striking, engaging and playful urban accent for the surrounding public space on the busy Quiddestraße.