Entering to bildarchitektur -
Hungarian Stand at Frankfurt Bookfair

Year ︎  2017
Outcome ︎ Pavilion
Location ︎ Frankfurt
Team ︎ Attila Róbert Csóka, Szabolcs Molnár, Dávid Smiló

Production ︎ Torter e-Design
Photo ︎ Balázs Danyi
Video ︎ VIZIT

Publications: Octogon magazine, Metszet, Építészfórum

2017 was the 130 anniversary of Lajos Kassák's birth - passed away 50 years ago. The Hungarian stand at the Frankfurter Buchmesse 2017 on the occasion payed respect to the work of the extraordinary avant-garde writer, painter, editor and public figure.

The work of Lajos Kassák is characterized by a strong relationship to architecture. This relationship, however, does not draw him to the products of built environment, but rather to the internal set of rules and design of architecture. It is not by chance that he named his paintings bildarchitektur -picture architecture.

His work seems to portray the belief that design elements and the constructed nature of art are means to quality. The design concept of the Hungarian stand at the Book Fair in Frankfurt was based on the assumption that the construction of Kassák's abstract shapes can be understood without their surroundings.

During the design process we have searched for ways to turn the ink and paint into boundary elements of the functional space. These constructivist paintings, nonetheless resembling imprints of spatial structures, in reality are patches on a flat surface: an obvious consequence of the material they are made of.

Hence, the patches extracted from the painting became cornerstones of the stand layout, allowed the visitor to enter and walk across Kassák's paintings. The patches painted once by Kassák were regarded very rigorously during the design process, which eventually made us doubt who the designers of the stand really were: was it Lajos Kassák himself or was the Paradigma Ariadné studio? And whether the resulting stand should be viewed as architecture or bildarchitektur instead?