There is plenty of room at the bottom

Fraunhofer Institute for Integrated Systems and Component Technology (IISB), Erlangen


The central entrance hall of the institute welcomes visitors and employees with a geometric pattern, an inlay work of white panes in anthracite-colored cement terrazzo. Depending on the point of view and the movement of the viewer, their arrangement creates new forms through perspective compression and distortion. Even two people standing close together do not see the same thing. If you go up the stairs to the two gallery levels, the floor becomes a picture surface, the pattern dissolves into a shimmering fabric. The rectangular format, which lies like a carpet in the hall, leaves the room. The physicist and Nobel Prize laureate Richard Feynman said in a lecture in 1959 that there is Plenty of Room at the Bottom. In connection with this work, the sentence is intended to stimulate thinking about space: about its volume, its plasticity; about space as a place and scale, as an in-between space, and thus as a reference system between us.

2022 marble slices in Ortsterrazzo; D circle = 6cm, floor area = 70 m²


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