»center peep«
berlin biennale 1998
A small hole in an outside wall of “Kunstwerke Berlin“ attracted a lot of attention from visitors to Berlin‘s first Art Biennale in 1998. There was the Berlin television tower, standing on its head in a fish-eye view, framed by an old Berlin back yard. Even though both motifs were familiar enough, their perspective and the combination of breadth and constriction were surprising, playing with human curiosity about everything hidden, and at the same time offering some unexpected angles on the Berlin district of Mitte. The view was constructed, and not, as many visitors assumed, created by a special lens: the hole in the wall was not directed at the television tower. The architects Armand Gruentuch and Almut Ernst successfully appealed to the pronounced voyeurism of the capital‘s inhabitants with their work “center Peep“; these visitors were given a different way of seeing the urban space through a perforated wall and an unusual viewing angle. Even then the little work had everything that characterizes the two architects‘ basic approach to the city: a strong sense of urban sensuality minus the spectacular, lucid games with objects and verticals in the urban space, and also a surprising degree of penetration and permeability between different spaces and bodies, opening up unexpected experiences to their protagonists through transparency and perforation.
Claus Käpplinger in the catalogue of the exhibition urban upgrade