Community Happens Here – 20 Years of Encounters in Architecture
With the exhibition *Community Happens Here*, steidle architekten celebrate their 20th anniversary by exploring architecture’s potential to foster community. The exhibition focuses on how urban spaces and their architecture facilitate encounters, encourage exchange, and shape the way we live together.
Through projects, images, and essays, the exhibition demonstrates how spaces become places of togetherness, foster connections, shape public life, and evolve into collective experiences. The city’s architecture is understood as a spatial practice that strengthens individuality, forms communities, and highlights the significance of their interactions with one another.
The exhibition “Community Happens Here” transforms the gallery itself into a space for dialogue and invites visitors to discover architecture as a source of inspiration and structure for a vibrant community.
The theme of communication and interaction—as a question of how we live together, shape our community, and seek to give it space and form—has been a key driving force behind the firm’s work from the very beginning. The way the founding generation of Steidle and Partner approached this theme, through the iconic structures of structuralism they created, continues to shape the image of modern housing construction to this day. With the rediscovery of the organic city as a sustainable model for living, our perspective broadened. The defining themes of encounter, accessibility, flexibility, interstitial space, order, publicness, and privacy were expanded to include architectural themes such as context, form, façade, and transformation; applied to larger, more complex building and urban projects; and thereby continually deepened.
Linked by a common thread, this exhibition explores the themes of communication and encounter by presenting a cross-section of the most significant buildings and projects of the past 20 years. When set in relation to key references from our own firm’s history, surprisingly new relationships and neighborhoods emerge. In a panoramic display, complemented by selected images, these themes come to life in the gallery. A simple scaffolding structure, serving as a temporary object, connects the world of animated cross-sections with the three-dimensionality of the space. For a brief moment, new paths, connections, visual relationships, and spaces emerge in the gallery. Encounters Happen Here.
In a separate layer we created specifically for this purpose, we have arranged the floor plans of our architectural and urban projects in a loose order to form a expansive collage of urban figures. Their striking, sometimes enigmatic forms define the character of our cities and shape our daily lives, both inside and out. Each figure bears traces of its specific location, embodying overarching rules while retaining its individuality. The interplay between external conditions and internal laws becomes palpable here. It is a joy to isolate these figures and bring them to life!
Urban planning models and models of selected individual buildings complement the wall collage to form a three-dimensional, almost physically tangible overall picture. In parallel, the respective projects are shown in an endless loop within their real-world context; here, too, the montage becomes a collage of an urban possibility.
Urban planning and architecture as a living practice is the subject of a specially commissioned photo series by Markus Lanz. He visited selected projects from the last 20 years and reexamined them from the perspective of community and encounter. In doing so, he investigated not only the interaction of users and residents with the architecture and urban space, but equally the relationships between the buildings and structures themselves. Encounters and Community Happen Here!