Bauen mit Holz – exhibition in the Künstlerhaus Vienna

»Bauen mit Holz – Wege in die Zukunft« (Building with Wood – Paths to the Future) is an exhibition by the architecture museum and the timber building department of the TU Munich that was launched in 2012 in  Munich’s Pinakothek der Moderne. Now, in an adapted form, it is presented by proHolz in cooperation with the Künstlerhaus in Munich. The aim of the exhibition is to explain and convey to a wider public the transformation of the building material wood, ignored for so long by modern architecture, into a new source of hope for forward-looking urban building.

The information is presented in the form of short texts, plans, photographs or videos on 120 cm wide, vertical strips of silk paper that extend the height of the space. The unbleached, naturally brown strips of paper are combined with models of timber buildings precisely constructed in the TU Munich and give the exhibition its rhythm.

Dates and facts are transformed in impressive explanatory graphics. The relationship between the “primal plant tree” and the technical world of planning and building is also a theme of the exhibition logo. An archetypical house is here formed out of the branches of a tree and semantically focuses on the core messages: that wood is a renewable, highly efficient building material and that building with wood is active climate protection. In the publication that accompanies the exhibition well-known specialist authors analyse the ecological significance, technological potential, and new aesthetic of this familiar construction material.