The subject of the exhibition

Because of the distinction made by our culture since biblical times between nomads and settled peoples, for us huts, tents and igloos are no more architecture than baskets, hammocks or cushions count as furniture. However, this kind of mobile, flexible, multiple-use furnishings have a long history with us, too. They were typical of the way people lived as long ago as antiquity and in the Middle Ages, and they have been rediscovered on numerous occasions, particularly in the 19th and 20th centuries. Additionally, cultural exchanges with other societies whose notion of the house and its furnishings is less static than ours have repeatedly provided new stimuli for the way we live. For example, Japanese objects have exerted an especially marked influence on the design and architecture of the Moderns. One of the central preoccupations of these Moderns was to energize our domestic environment - either using multipurpose rooms that merged into one another or with the help of multifunctional furnishings.

Innovations driven by the desire to make the living space more flexible

In fact, no other problem has brought forth such a wealth of innovations in living space design as the desire to make the latter more flexible. Right up until the present day, almost all the great designers have grappled with this subject, from Frank Lloyd Wright through Gerrit Rietveld, Mies van der Rohe, Charles and Ray Eames, Jean Prouvé, Joe Colombo and Achille Castiglioni right up to Ron Arad, Rem Koolhas and Shigeru Ban. And as our working and our private lives increasingly overlap, and a mobile, independent lifestyle becomes increasingly important, today, more than ever, what we are looking for is a way of living which is not tied to fixed patterns and predetermined locations.

Creative potential in a global perspective

Today more than ever, the existence of parallel, entirely disparate cultures allows for and indeed calls out for global comparison in order to survey the creative potential of flexible living. However, any portrayal of the subject needs to take into account that the kind of mobile, adaptable dwellings proposed by architects, designers and engineers cannot often be divided up into such categories. Consequently, alongside an Asian houseboat and the transportable "NhEW" house by the OpenOffice/COPENHAGEN Office Group, which indissolubly melds the house with its furnishings, our exhibition "Living in Motion" shows a multitude of amazing hybrids, which appear to be neither furniture nor architecture, but some kind of furnitecture. And as if following Le Corbusier's recommendation to view the home as a tool, or Joe Colombo's comments that it would be better to refer to domestic furnishings as equipment, the manifestations of contemporary street culture - mobile phones protruding from cargo pockets or jackets that can be transformed into armchairs or tents - reference the meaning of the apartment as part of the equipment we carry around with us on our own bodies.

Transitions from static to moving elements

As biology teaches us, in the final analysis, mobility, change and adaptability are amongst the prerequisites of life itself. Consequently, the fact that this exhibition focuses our attention on the kind of cultures that have a different relationship with nature from our own is particularly exciting. But a smooth transition from static to moving elements is not only in the nature of life and forms part of the life of close-to-nature peoples, it is also in the nature of the housing "familiar" to us. Windows and doors as zones of movement between indoors and outdoors and between individual rooms testify to this. And after all, our movements within the house and out of it are mirrored when we use our cars as the latter's satellites. All forms of nomadic existence have their settled moments just as all settled existence has its nomadic elements and of course living somewhere also includes arriving and being there, a protective and preserving function, just as a house and its furnishings are themselves something to protect and preserve. This is why (in the case of fleeing or homelessness) a mobile, itinerant way of living can indeed be the result of endangerment. In our society, however, the values that defined property on the one hand and free space, the freedom for personal experience on the other, have now changed. It is probably for this reason that the most promising way we can make the places we live more flexible is to develop the range of experiences they offer us. Extended data transmission functions can make just as much of a contribution to this as flexible room division and furnishing items.

The structure of the exhibition

Neither an historical survey nor a geographical one nor dividing the exhibition up into up architecture, furniture and miscellaneous objects seemed appropriate methods of structuring the subject in a meaningful and stimulating way. Instead, the exhibition divides up its exhibits according to their function or what they are capable of, i.e., into Transporting, Adapting, Combining, Assembling and Disassembling, Folding and Unfolding and finally Wearing and Carrying. Particularly suitable for saving space when storing large or heavy objects, especially for transportation purposes, the principle of assembly and disassembly investigates an Asian yurt, Kare Klint's "Colonial Chair" and Tony O'Neill's "Nesting Storage Unit". By contrast, modular buildings such as Wes Jones' "Package Housing System" or furniture such as Werner Aisslinger's shelving system for Magis tend to demonstrate the possibilities offered by collapsible living objects for flexible and creative use. Not least, the function of many of the works presented is to save space. Folding also saves space, but functions in a completely different way from disassembling. Parasols, umbrellas and partition screens from the Far East demonstrate how, without using tools and with comparatively little effort, unfolding can transform simple shapes into complex structures. Objects that can be rolled up or blown up follow a similar principle.