Sandra Bartoli & Silvan Linden: Licht Luft Scheisse

Environmental questions are not a new phenomenon. More than a hundred years ago, conceptual models and processes emerged in response to growing industrialization and urbanization, which still resonate with our current ideas about sustainability. These approaches not only reflected systematic understandings of interactions between humans and the environment or between nature and technology, but also a growing awareness of modernity, which is undermining the very foundations of life. Sandra Bartoli and Silvan Linden are the founders of the Berlin studio Büros für Konstruktivismus. Together with Florian Wüst, they are the editors of the books Licht Luft Scheisse – Archeologie udržitelnosti and Licht Luft Scheisse – Über Natur (adocs Hamburg, 2020). These publications are the result of an ongoing research project examining the environmental history of architecture. In 2019, the trio curated two exhibitions of the same name, which took place in Berlin at the Museum of the Botanical Garden and at neue gesellschaft für bildende Kunst (nGbK). The project was funded by the German Federal Cultural Foundation and the Lotto Stiftung Foundation. Sandra Bartoli is an architect and landscape architect. In her research, she focuses on places where nature and the city intersect, such as Tiergarten in Berlin, a transgressive example of a place that leads to new definitions and models of what is "urban" within the challenges of the Anthropocene. Together with Jörg Stollmann, she published the book Tiergarten: Landscape of Transgression (Park Books, 2019). From 2017 to 2018, she worked on her research topic The City’s Future Natural History as a visiting professor for visionary forms of the city at the Institute for Art and Architecture at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna, and she is now a full professor at the Faculty of Architecture at the University of Applied Sciences in Munich. Silvan Linden is an architect and co-publisher of the series AG Architektur in Gebrauch (adocs Verlag Hamburg), an architectural zine that the office began publishing in 2014, in which "use" is explored as an aesthetic category informing the development and transformations of architectural space. Linden is a co-author of the book La Zona – Index (ngbk Berlin, 2012) and along with Arno Brandlhuber, he is the editor of the series of architectural publications Disko 1–25 (AdBK Nürnberg, 2006–2011). He has served as a visiting professor at the Academy of Fine Arts in Nuremberg, and has also taught at the Technical University of Berlin, Greenwich University in London, and the Technical University of Braunschweig.
The series In Focus: Berlin was prepared by Miroslav Pazdera Supported by the State Cultural Fund.