Plattenbau
To define space, boundaries are needed. With them come an inside, an outside, an in-between. The boundary can be thin or thick, and in this way become an object in its own right. Its formal expression stands in reciprocal relation to the space, or the space between. Its effect can be shaped, and can be calm, dynamic, simple, complex, or a combination of all of these.
The interplay of object and space can be studied particularly well in the minimalist, geometric works of the Spanish ceramicist and sculptor Enric Mestre (1936–2026). With a few rational geometries, his forms generate a poetic expressiveness and spaces full of tension — Mestre himself spoke of wanting to give rationalism a poetic inflection. Some of his spaces are visually accessible; others remain hidden within the volume and exist only in our imagination.
Small openings mark the points of access to them. Together with recesses, additions, and their proportions, they recall architectural objects. We are tempted to read them as models — as three-dimensional images of a much larger situation. This effect is generally reinforced by the flat surfaces. Often a cube or a slab appears to be the starting point, transformed through subtraction and addition into an expressive composition. A few precise deviations from the orthogonal generate tension. They seem to respond to a context that remains hidden from us. In fact, this context did have a place: the huerta around Mestre's hometown of Alboraya, near Valencia — irrigation channels, walls, field paths, industrial sheds. His architectures are abstractions of this everyday, anonymous building tradition, translated into chamotte stoneware, built up slab by slab, fired at around 1280 °C. They are architectures that no one can enter: "Arquitecturas para la mirada" — architectures for the gaze.
This semester, under the title "Plattenbau," we want to work in ceramics. As with Mestre, our starting point is the slab: the simplest tectonic element, and at once boundary, wall, and material. Volumes emerge from clay slabs — volumes that enclose space, conceal it, or merely assert it. We begin with the material itself. Clay is weathered stone — plastic, malleable, patient, yet unforgiving: it dries, shrinks, cracks, and only becomes irreversibly fixed through firing. It is a material that demands responsibility and sustained engagement from students as well. This is precisely where its design and artistic quality lies: form emerges through an ongoing dialogue with the material. To understand the material from the ground up, an excursion and workshop at the start of the semester will take us to its origin — the Ziegelwerk Nicoloso brickworks in Pottenbrunn (Lower Austria). Building on these experiences, over the course of the semester each student develops their own ceramic work in line with the assignment — through drafts, sketches, studies, trials, decisions, drying phases, and firings.
The resulting objects will be presented to the public in a joint exhibition in January.
Lehrende