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Peter Mörtenböck & Helge Mooshammer
research and writings on art, architecture and politics
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Minotaur - A Contemporary Maze Art and Architecture at Kielder, Northumberland, competition 2001 published in Peter Mörtenböck: 'Cruising Architecture'; in: UdK Berlin (eds.): Identität und Individualisierung, Universität der Künste Berlin 2002, ISBN 3-89462-096-X ![]() The design of the Kielder Maze in Northumberland/UK proposed here is based on a collaboration between ThinkArchitecture and media artist beta whose work aims at exploring social implications of spatial human interaction. Our joint proposal focuses on bringing together two crucial moments, evident in the notion of the maze: First a desire to inscribe oneself into or to map oneself onto landscape ('been there'), e.g. on a mountain top or in the centre of a maze (e.g. the manifold inscriptions in the trees in the Hampton Court Maze). Second the intention to materialise structures of symbolic order. This points at historical/cultural changes from hierarchies organised around central power to decentred societies, from the maze as a space of representation to a multi-positional space and hence the idea that the design of the contemporary maze should respond to these changes (i.e. today it is a place for a wider public and not for a single souvereign). These two observations are superimposed in our proposal which consists of a labyrinth structure that has no centre because it is only centre, or rather it is a number of displaced centralities organised as a maze. Dispersing the centre of the maze and making every location of the maze equally central, visitors are invited to inscribe themselves into the walls along their walk through the wooden structure - reflecting the abundance of nature in Kielder, all walls of this maze will consist of an endless surface of timber boards - these inscriptions in turn will record the diverse histories and multiple journeys of its visitors. |
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