WATER, BLUE GOLD OF THE 21ST CENTURY
Our exhibition proposal for Gasometer GmbH was selected for installation inside Europe’s tallest gasometer.
The design concept was based upon water. Water is a condition for all life. We, food and the earth are all mostly water. Of all the water in the earth's biosphere, only 3% is sweet water, the rest is salty; and 87% of the sweet water is locked up in the polar ice caps, leaving only 0.4% of the earth’s water accessible for humans, crops and animals.
Providing healthy drinkable water to everyone on the globe, both in industrialised countries as well as developing ones, is a phenomenal challenge during the 21st century.
In most places throughout the world, you carry water in plastic bottles or jars. It does not come out of a tap. Safe, drinkable water is the gold of the 21st century.
We sought to communicate the purity of water, expressed through the states of water, notably ice, and to convey its beauty, preciousness and sounds.
The visitor enters the first of many corridors within an illuminated carved cylindrical block of ice symbolising the polar ice caps. This is the ice labyrinth. On the intermediate floor above is the main didactic part of the water exhibition. In the main gasometer space itself, an enormous ice cone was installed - measuring 50m in height. An ice skin forms on an internally illuminated taut and translucent skin.
The exhibition ran for six months from autumn 2001 until spring 2002, and had 300,000 visitors.
It was considered a major success.
We were assisted by THP Architektur, Schmidt Reuter, Ulrike Brandi Licht and Paul Schutze.
“What in water did Bloom, water lover, drawer of water, water carrier returning to the range, admire? Its universality: its democratic quality.”
(James Joyce, Ulysses)