You could call Team 4 the “house architect” of the museum. Initially, they were the project architect for Alessandro Mendini — chief designer of the Groninger Museum — in 1994, then they did the revitalisation of the building in 2010. The first exhibit they designed was an instant blockbuster: David Bowie is. “That was a success for the museum but also for us. From that came Rodin - Genius at Work and now The Return of Lester's Loops," says Thoe Schwartzenberg en Hohenlansberg. “We have such an incredibly good relationship with the museum and the team runs so well; I hope that if there's another cool exhibit like this that we'll be involved in again. It's a fun and exciting world. And I've also kind of fallen in love with this building.”
STEEL, CONCRETE AND STYROFOAM
The Coop Himmelb(l)au pavilion is a large space in red, black and grey. The walls and floors are crooked, thick H-beams support the ceiling, and massive staircases lead to bridges that run from one side to the other at a height of a few feet. Everything has geometric shapes and is made of steel or concrete.
In this skewed space, enormous white cylinders of styrofoam stand together. Some seem to have fused with each other to form a group, while a few stand alone. They vary in diameter and in some places there is an opening from bottom to top so you can walk through the structures. In the cylinders you find yourself in a white, diffuse world. The sound of the films projected on the inside is absorbed by the foam. The forms are pierced by the bridges and beams of the pavilion. Thoe Schwartzenberg en Hohenlansberg looks with satisfaction at the outside of the first group of cylinders. “When you look at how perfectly everything is cut out, you're basically just entering a digital world.” And that’s what it is.
DIGITAL 3D MODEL
Team 4 has a unique trick for fitting and measuring: a special scanning technique using lasers. And that's handy, because the drawings the museum has were made by hand in the 1980s and are therefore less accurate.
“We already 3D-scanned the space for the David Bowie exhibit. By placing the lasers in different places in the room, millions of digital measuring points are created. It's called a point cloud. We can give each of these dots a colour so that a three-dimensional picture is created. It's a sort of digital model in which we can measure and test all kinds of things,” explains Thoe Schwartzenberg en Hohenlansberg. “Based on that, we then create another digital 3D model in which we can put the client's design. This allows us to work much more precisely and also much more quickly than with drawings we used to make 'by hand'. It provides an enormous amount of certainty about the production process.”
THE ARTIST TAKES THE LEAD
The exhibit is a complex collaboration between artist, museum, architects and lighting, image and sound technicians. The idea for the design of the exhibit comes from Lester himself, but everything is made to fit by Team 4. The cylinders have been cut by a specialist company. Team 4 just makes sure everything is technically possible and advises Lester on that. “At first, for example, he had it in his head that he wanted to make the cylinders different heights, but it turned out from our point cloud that that just didn't fit. And that's fine. Fortunately, Gabriel is a practical artist in this respect and adjusts his plans accordingly. That's how we put the finishing touches on things in co-creation.”
The architects' precision work also has to take practical issues into account, such as emergency exit routes, fire safety and routing. “But with art, the artist always takes the lead.”