T he Eberswalde Library first appears to be a simple box, clad or dressed with printed concrete and glass panels, and photo- graphic images appearing repeatedly in con- tinuous bands along the façade. It is often represented in publications simply as walls of communicative images.The question that comes to mind is: why are these images there? What do they have to do with the building? The Eberswalde Library is a collaborative effort between the architects Herzog & de Meuron and Thomas Ruff, a Düsseldorf based artist who undertook the task of selecting the images. Drawn from Ruff’s archive of newspaper photographs, these images range from the figure of Alexander von Humboldt, Lorenzo Lotto’s Venus, a prototype aircraft known as CBY-3, and a pair of stag beetles, to name a few. Each image seems to tell its own story, especially that taken on the day the Berlin Wall went up depicting a seventy- year-old woman being lowered from a house into the western sector of the city.This also seems to hold true for the image of a flag-
waving crowd gathered in front of the Berlin Reichstag. Seen separately as photographic image, the meaning of each is undeniable. Except per- haps for the ubiquitous stag beetle, most images seem to pertain to certain contem- porary relevance. Each seems to represent the portrait of a place, time, and attitude, yet as a collective whole, any unified meaning or category becomes elusive. Being repeatedly transferred onto concrete wall panels, spe- cific meanings of these newspaper photos were inevitably transformed. Each photo- graph appears horizontally sixty-six times, presenting seventeen different bands of images enveloping the building.The boundar- ies of their effective meanings blur as each image is being repeated and each band is being framed by adjacent bands. How are we to read the portrait of von Humboldt next to a stag beetle? Are we to read them as rhetoric images at all? Perhaps it is a deliberate act to subdue the sharpness and eloquence of the photographs’ meaning by repetition and juxtaposition. It becomes
futile to decipher their collective message or theorize Ruff’s rationale for his choices of images: perhaps there is none. Yet, to conclude that aesthetic is solely the driving force behind those walls is also misleading. At a closer look, as one approaches the Eberswalde Library, one realizes what lies ahead is simply an architectural surface: no more, no less. Perhaps it is not a surface that tries to communicate nor offers itself as a vehicle of ideology. Its etched concrete panels constitute neither a wall of messages nor a platform of meanings. Consider the Eberswalde Library as what it really is: a building in its totality. Rather than a series of close-up photos, one can see that each image is no longer an individual news- paper photo or an archival picture. With their simple repetition and juxtaposition, nei- ther the individual nor the collective meaning begs to be read: each image becomes an architectural element, an integral part of the building’s cladding, as much as a skin is a part of a person’s body.
From newspapers to walls Tonkao Panin
Des journaux aux murs La bibliothèque Eberswalde est souvent présentée dans diverses publications comme étant tout simplement con- stituée de murs recouverts d’images communicatives. La multitude d’images est le résul- tat d’un travail de collaboration entre les architectes Herzog et de Meuron et l’artiste de Düs
tition de chaque image et la démarcation de chaque bande de photos par les bandes adja- centes. La surface de la bibliothèque Eberswalde est une surface articulée, mais c’est une artic- ulation qui ne demande pas nécessairement à être
Considérée séparément en tant que photo de journal, la sig- nification de chaque image est indubitable; cependant, vues dans leur ensemble, elles échappent à toute tentative de catégorisation ou de dégage- ment d’une unité de sens. Les limites de leur signification réelle s’estompent avec la répé
seldorf,Thomas Ruff. Parmi ces images, tirées des archives de photos de journaux de Ruff, fig - urent une photo d’Alexandre von Humboldt, une autre de la Vénus de Lorenzo Lotto, une photo d’un avion proto- type connu sous le nom de CBY-E et d’une paire de scar- abées cerfs-volants.
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O n S ite review
T ransformations
I ssue 7 2002
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