21 March 2007 – 10 July 2007

slide show: Joseph Grimma, Stefano Boeri, Armin Linke

A concret pyramid of 330 m height is characterizing the skyline of Pyongyang: Ryugyong Hotel, conceived for the youth festival of 1989, never accomplished. The fabric with 105 levels was constructed under Kim Il Sung, today world’s largest hotel is standing as the significant concret ruin of a political utopie in the capital of a country without tourism. On the roof, like the antenna of a transmitting station, an erection crane that has become obsolete.

In June 2005 Milano Architecture Magazine Domus called for ideas for use and redesign of Ryugyong Hotel. "At the risk of astounding and bewildering our readers", says Domus editor Stefano Boeri, " it is our conviction that a magazine like Domus today has an obligation to position architecture and furniture design within the real economic and international political situation. Media have - by permanent presentation - the power to make significant places to „superplaces“ and to reduce them to a cliché. Domus sees changing the status of these places by making them to an antenna for new ideas as a tool against a leveling globalization.

Joseph Grima - together with Stefano Boeri and Armin Linke interweaved the 120 ideas of the brainstormings together with films and photographs, propaganda scripts and texts to a complex video portrait of the city Pyongyang.

Fiction Pyongyang, curated by Joseph Grima together with Stefano Boeri and Armin Linke, was presented in Triennale of Milan, the Italian Pavilion 2006 Venice Biennial and is traveling to Architecture Foundation in London in 2007.

Address

project space karlsplatz
Karlsplatz, Treitlstraße 2
1040 Wien
phone +43-1-52189-1201
http://www.kunsthallewien.at

Opening Hours

Daily 4 p.m. - midnight,
Sunday/ Monday 1 p.m. -7 p.m.

Within 10 days
starting exhibitions
ending exhibitions