Barkow Leibinger

Barkow Leibinger
Schillerstraße 94, D–10625 Berlin
T +49(0)30 315712 -0 F -29
info@barkowleibinger.com
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Loom-Hyperbolic Marrakech

Working on this installation for the 4th Marrakech Biennale the question for us became: which form of knowledge can be brought to this situation and can start to mediate those that we find on-site? What effects can we produce by considering geometrical form as found in the architecture of Marrakech and as constructed by using current algorithm software programming and then begin to speculate how these forms might be rendered (made physical) by local craft techniques and materials?

One of the local techniques that became compelling is traditional weaving on a wood frame loom. The frame is a rigid structural frame which holds yarn in place as a series of parallel lines forming surfaces – a technique we reapplied at an architectural scale with the ambition of producing 3-dimensional volumes.

The site for our work, the ruin at the Mosque Koutoubia, informed the proposed project and established a scale for the work. We chose a simple construction of light hand-peeled pine poles attached to steel plates and tubes, then pulled yarn over the frames which alternate in their positions and tied them off as if they were laid over a giant loom spaced closely together. The irregular slightly bent forms of the wood poles softens the hard geometry of our digital computer drawings sympathetically.

Project Information

Architects — Barkow Leibinger, Berlin Frank Barkow, Regine Leibinger

 

Project Architect — Gustav Düsing

 

Exhibition — 4th Marrakech Biennale "Higher Atlas", February 29th - June 3rd 2012

 

Photos:

© Gustav Düsing/Barkow Leibinger

© Johannes Foerster