Raphael Hefti, Launching rockets never gets old

Nature vs. structure

Welcome to Audi City

With over 50% of the world’s population living in urban areas, the city is becoming the prevalent framework for human living. Just as Audi City uses technology to create space in the middle of our dense urban environments, we ask, how can the challenges of a smaller space lead to innovation and new spatial concepts?  

We hope to discuss and reveal fascinating projects from around the world which transform human interaction with space.  From artists who are interested in the experience of the body in the environment to ingenious technologies that present new possibilities for living, to reflections on the future of mobility. 

Koolhaas’s ruin

Rem Koohaas and his studio OMA has been commissioned by Dasha Zhukova of The Garage to recreate the Vremena Goda (Seasons of the Year) restaurant, a prefab Soviet era concrete building that was abandoned to graffitti and the elements for the last 20 years.  

City mobility

Event Horizon

Dark City

NOWNESS, a luxury culture blog, recently featured the haunting photography of William Eckersley. The fine art photographer roamed the city of London at night, braving the elements to capture lightings and surfaces that make up the night space. He says, “The lack of humanity is a really interesting prism to see the city through.”

“The build environment, deliberately contrived to service the needs and desires of humanity, makes sense in the context of teeming human life - without this however, its inherent functionality no longer visible, our urban spaces appeared to stand forlorn, waiting to be judged on their genius or folly, beauty or ugliness. This is a series of photographs depicting London at night….”
- William Eckersley

The images come from his recently released book, Dark City, released by Stucco Press.

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Audi Futures

Gormley’s body implant

Gormley’s pivotal environmental installation is now on its third incarnation in São Paulo, following installations in New York and London. One of his many explorations with sculpture using his own figure, the work examines the internalization of the city into the human body.  The sculptural experience features life size figures cast from the artist’s own body, embedded into the urban landscape, creating a fictional horizon line. 31 of these bronze sculptures will be placed on the tops of buildings, visible from street level.  They linger mysteriously, creating a sort of connect the dots experience, as one suddenly notices the presence of a figure, not one but two, and so on! They allude to a moment of contemplation prior to suicide or angels looking down on us.  

“The plinth was the cumulative effect of seeing the everyday elevated or in a new frame.  I think ‘Event Horizon’ is rather different. It is the sense of discovering the same body in very different circumstances, so it is less about the subject and more about the content.  It has to do with questioning both the status of art and the nature of our built environment. In a time of rising environmental awareness it asks the question: ‘Where does the human being fit into the scheme of things?”
- Gormley, 2010

In Sao Paolo, Gormley decided to centre the installation on the founding point of the city, where Jesuit missionaries first officially founded the village of São Paulo dos Campos de Piratininga.  The district is the oldest part of the city, and the streets here are solely for pedestrians which contrast the omnipresent driving culture of São Paulo.  Gormley says that these iconic figures “activate the skyline in order to encourage people to look around. In this process of looking and finding, or looking and seeking, one perhaps re-assess one’s own position in the world and becomes aware of one’s status of embedment.”