Capital Airport BBI: The final designs for Art on Site have been selected

Last autumn the first three designs for the Art on Site projects at the new BBI Airport were announced; now the final three designs for the six works for the Art on Site project have been chosen. The following designs, all of which were inspired by the competition brief “Air – Land”, were selected by an independent jury of experts:

“Open Sky Box” by Takehito Koganezawa, behind the security zone on the departures level: the Open Sky Box is a floor-to-ceiling lightbox that glows in blue and white at random. Passengers will see it when walking from the security checking zone to the Marketplace. In an abstract way and in the context of the airport, it anticipates the journey they are embarking on.

“untitled” by Matt Mullican, in the Plaza at the Airportcity: a variety of motifs and images sand-blasted onto the side and back walls and the ceiling of the two stairways leading up from the underground BBI station into the Airportcity. The “Subject Pavilion” will deal with the topic of flying, the heavens and cosmology, while the “Object Pavilion” features direct references to Berlin and Brandenburg.

“Gate X” by Björn Melhus – art on display at the so-called “virtual site”, i.e. new media and online: Gate X is the gateway to a virtual parallel world inside the BBI terminal. Using smartphones, travellers can explore a virtual “castle in the air” and see its ghostly inhabitants, which bear a marked similarity to the computer-generated family from the aircraft safety videos. The project plays with the question of where our mobile society is really at home.

The jury praised the high quality of the selected designs. “The results of the competition reveal a very high standard, even in an international comparison. It reflects the significance of the brief and does justice to the dimension of the new airport as an aviation hub that reaches out all around the world. Compared with many other art on site competitions, we have succeeded here in bringing together the six locations and giving them a certain unity through the overall design brief and the request that the works create a narrative around the interface between land and air, arrival and departure, foreign countries and home. Instead of individual placements, the designs create a closely intermeshed web – both in terms of content and form – built around the diverse interpretations and artistic readings of the topic ‘Airport’”, says Dr. Stephan Berg, Director of the Bonn Art Museum and vice-chairman of the jury. Other jury members include Udo Kittelmann, Director of the Nationalgalerie, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Dr. Manfred A. Körtgen, Managing Director of Operations/BBI at Berlin Airports, Hajo Paap, associated partner at gmp-Architekten, Katharina Grosse, artist, and Dr. Perdita von Kraft, Director of Kunstmuseen Dieselkraftwerk Cottbus.

The announcement of these three designs means that all six works of art which will be on permanent display at the new airport have now been chosen. All works are to be completed and installed by the time BBI opens in June 2012. For anyone interested in taking a look at the winning designs in advance of the airport opening, there is a special exhibition on at the airportworld bbi, the airport’s visitor centre. The “Kunst am Bau / Art on Site” exhibition features pictures of the submissions and presents the winning designs. The exhibition is open from Monday to Friday, 10.00 am to 6.00 pm and admission is free of charge.