151fbf_iNZauberwald: from tree to book!
Kaingaroa Forest in New Zealand is the world's largest man-made forest covering a 2900 km² surface area. Frankfurt Book Fair is the world's largest book fair covering over 7,300 exhibitors. WHAT_architecture brings these two phenomena together under one 3,000 sqm roof to create a forest landscape of 1,000 trunks, branches… books are ultimately from trees, a page is a leaf. Clearings are then made in the forest to create places for reading, eating, sitting, selling, meandering… create your own passage in the enchanted NZ forest in Frankfurt: iNZauberwald! This is a forest library not a bookshop crammed with books. If we spatialise 1500 books over 365+ trees (a tree a day…) we end up with +/- 4 books per tree or rather 1 book per sqm: an open but private bookshop forest. Overlay this with talking trees. Don't bunch books together, spread them apart. Each book tells a different story.
The East London fixie-fixation bike manifests itself in a Red Bull Velodrome open event in York Hall, Bethnal Green. Not your normal size i.e. 2012 Olympic measured velodrome but in a celebratory "World's Smallest" scaled-down bike-racing track – Scaletfix? – where the athletics are adorned in the everyday aesthetic. Where the riders and the audience are close not only to the action – "where spectators are competitors are that linked" – but also in the desire to Ride. The repercussions for reproducing the field of play in different shapes and sizes – such as our own (plug coming…) football boxes – mean that we not only improve spectatorship but also athleticism.