Following the assimilation of the Cooper Union Design Museum in New York into the Smithsonian Institution as the Copper-Hewitt Museum, founding director Lisa Taylor wanted an opening exhibition which reflected and celebrated not only the museum's new status but also its new direction and which visually translated the "philosophy of the Smithsonian Institution's new National Museum of Design"
To this end in 1974 selected designers and architects, including Richard Saul Wurman, Charles and Ray Eames and George Nelson, were asked to submit exhibition proposals; the commission ultimately being awarded to the Austrian architect and designer Hans Hollein and his MAN transFORMS concept which opened on October 7th 1976. According to Hans Hollein MAN transFORMS was conceived not only as an exhibition which presented design but which in itself was "a statement about what Design is" and above all was intended to be "a show on life and situations of life"
Aside from the main exhibition which included, amongst other exhibits, a table presenting different types of bread, a room presenting different forms of hammers and a detailed look at the multitude of uses for a simple piece of cloth, MAN transFORMS presented specially commissioned contributions by Peter M. Bode, Arata Isozaki, Ettore Sottsass, Richard Buckminster Fuller, Richard Meier, Nader Ardalan/Karl Schlamminger and Oswald M. Ungers.
In context of the Plan 14 Architecture Festival the Ungers Archiv für Architekturwissenschaft in Cologne will present a paired down version of Oswald M. Ungers' contribution: Morphologie - City Metaphors. Transforming a corridor on the ground floor of the Copper-Hewitt museum into an idealised street, Morphologie - City Metaphors juxtapositioned cityscapes, urban plans and built environments with natural organisms, natural networks and images of everyday life; the two images united under one common term, for example "Intersecting", "Regularity" or "Backbone". With his installation Ungers hoped to motivate and inspire visitors to new perspectives on not only the world around them and how that was to be understood, but also the ways and means by which things could be created, styled and realised.
Themes that fit in very nicely with Plan 14's central motto: Architektur im Kontext - Architecture in Context.
In addition to a scale model of the original New York installation the exhibition in Cologne will feature a selection of the original photos and presentation boards, and thus hopes not only to inspire and motivate as the original installation once did but also help elucidate on the way Oswald M. Ungers thought and worked.
O.M. Ungers - Morphologie - City Metaphors can be viewed at the at Ungers Archiv für Architekturwissenschaft, Belvederestrasse 60, 50933 Cologne from Friday 19th until Friday 26th September 2014.
Full details can be found at www.ungersarchiv.de
