European Culture Week Installation
“Classism in Architecture”
Year
1985
Between Division and Desire: A Semiotic Meditation on Classicism, the Body, and Memory
From the outside, it appears almost familiar. The exhibition hall, orchestrated by TCA with seemingly classicist gestures, immediately evokes memories of temples, porticoes, and an ideal of harmony that has long since fractured. Yet anyone who takes the first step inside enters a semiotic labyrinth—a space where signs do not merely refer, but speak, contradict, disguise themselves.
For this exhibition is not a mere arrangement of architectural quotations. It is a deconstruction. A critique. And, above all: a myth.
TCA builds a mythological bridge to one of humanity’s oldest narratives—that Platonic image of the original human, with two heads, four arms, two genders, whom the gods—afraid of their wholeness—split in two. Ever since, the legend goes, each half longs for its other, lost self.
In this sense, the exhibition is not a space, but a story about space. And as Eco once wrote: “Every text is a tissue of quotations.” So too is this architecture a tissue of fragments, signs, relics—not nostalgic, but subversive. Classicism is not honored here, but interrogated: What does it mean to use a “classical” form? What remains of the ideal when its semantic core disintegrates?
TCA shows us: the contemporary architect who reaches for ornament also reaches for myth. Not to restore order, but to make visible the longing for wholeness. Division is not just a theme of mythology—it is embedded in the history of architecture itself. The classical form was never complete. It was always already a fragment disguised as a whole.
Thus the journey through the exhibition does not end in resolution, but in a mirror. The visitor sees themselves—as a seeker, as part of an incomplete whole. And perhaps it is precisely in this moment that architecture ceases to be mere form—and begins to become narrative.
Design and construction of a installation and space for an international exhibition on classicism. The genesis for this design was the classical hermaphrodite. As a reminder of our essential equality, visitors to the exhibition are compelled to be born into the space individually through narrow entrance channels.
Location: Karlsruhe, Germany
