Kalkbreite: Künstler am Bau Christoph Faulhaber

Art in Architecture – Christoph Faulhaber

Kalkbreite has no Art-in-Architecture-project, but an site-specific artist: Christoph Faulhaber. In 2010 he won the two-phase, international art and construction competition, the Kalkbreite “Kunst am Bau”. The jury unanimously selected the Hamburg artist’s “Cooperative” project as the winner among the ten submitted works. The jury was impressed by the conceptual approach of Faulhaber’s process-oriented project, which reflected the work and philosophy of the Kalkbreite Cooperative with regards to its construction project and its vision of future coexistence in a 2000-watt society.

Kalkbreite: Künstler am Bau Christoph Faulhaber

The central idea behind Faulhaber’s project proposal was to invest the entire prize money in the amount of CHF 240,000 in an annual interest income of an artists for their work over the next 24 years. In return, the latter makes one twelfth of its annual output available to the cooperative. After 24 years, when the estate has long since been built, occupied and revived and the next generation has grown up, the money, earmarked for art and construction would be made available again. Thus, there is no single commissioned work of art, no percent for art, but rather the construct of a common ideal participation in the complete work of a single producing artist, Christoph Faulhaber at his annual residence in Kalkbreite (here 2017).

During his residence in January 2019, Faulhaber presented his newly published publication A Golden Age, which gives a overview of his work and projects in the recent years, including the project “Cooperative”. He also presented his current work “Revolution and Architecture” – an installation of eighty colored balls of three meters in diameter, with which he turned the former nave of Kunsthalle Osnabrück into a bouncy castle. One twelfth of this exhibition, that is six balls, leaves Faulhaber to the cooperative Kalkbreite as «artistic dividend». But what to do with this oversized art? Read more

Vita: Artist Christoph Faulhaber (german only)