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Superposition

@superposition.global

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a periodical, investigating the human side of architecture, founded in 2020

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HOW TO WORK OUT PROBLEMS OF YOUR OWN MAKING: HUMOUR AND MINIMALISM - Dominic Kim in conversation with Elizabeth Orr 
New York-based artist Elizabeth Orr works with aluminium, glass, and Plexiglass, modular sculptures whose logic she describes as a building code of her own invention. Blinds, wall plates, shutters, grates: for Orr, these architectural attributes are not structural elements but appearances of architecture, interchangeable, replaceable, and rich with contradiction. In conversation with Dominic Kim, she moves between the influence of her late father, light and space artist Eric Orr, and the minimalism of the 1960s; between hand-cutting aluminium on a table saw and the design language of green screens and chroma key; between French wash technique and Baudrillard. Working within self-invented constraints, she finds the same freedom an architect finds in a building code, the ruler that rules her, and the rules she breaks. Humour, she argues, is not opposed to minimalism but essential to it: a contradiction, like all the best ones, that is funny to some and not to others.  Conversation between @orretorr and @itsnikikim
Photographs by @maxcreasy  
Superposition Workout - 2023
 Guest edited by @freekpersyn

Published and edited by @leobettinioberkalmsteiner @tiborbielicky @maxcreasy @ellenaehrl @itsnikikim

Art direction and design by @daly_lyon taken in New York City by @superposition.global

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a month ago

Jes Fernie - EMPTINESS, LOVE, AND DESTRUCTION  
For twelve years, writer and curator Jes Fernie, creator of story-telling platform Archive of Destruction, has been collecting stories about destruction and public art, narratives of rage, fear, greed, and love, of trauma, intrigue, and catharsis. Her essay traces three works across three cities. In Dublin in 1980, Marta Minujín erected an 8.5-metre tower built from 5,000 freshly baked loaves of bread, tipped it on its side, and invited the public to strip it bare. Mayhem ensued, the Argentine ambassador was pelted, and one child asked the artist if she’d brought any butter. In Skopje, Nada Prlja responded to the destruction by fire of Borko Lazeski’s monumental post-office murals by repainting them from memory at varying scales, each one a fluid interpretation rather than a copy; an act of solidarity with the city and a meditation on the fragility of collective memory. In Hamden, Connecticut, James Wines and SITE buried twelve cars in graduated layers of asphalt, only for an unknown protagonist to add another thick layer six years later, ruining the work in the artist’s own eyes. It was eventually demolished in 2003 to make way for another car park. When something no longer exists, Fernie argues, the void left by its absence can become more powerful than its embodied state, artworks growing more potent through the very act of their destruction.

@archiveofdestruction @jesfernie   Superposition Workout - 2023

Guest edited by @freekpersyn

Published and edited by @leobettinioberkalmsteiner @tiborbielicky @maxcreasy @ellenaehrl @itsnikikim

Art direction and design by @daly_lyon taken in Hamden, Connecticut by @superposition.global

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a month ago

Ewa Effiom - ALEXANDER’S DREAM 
The myth is well known: after conquering Egypt, Alexander the Great dreamed of Homer, who quoted lines from The Odyssey pointing him toward Pharos. He went there, looked out over the desolate landscape, and decided Alexandria would be built. Dinocrates, the city’s architect, laid out a wondrous urban grid — but without chalk, used barley to mark his vision. A flock of sea birds consumed it. The soothsayers called it a good omen. And so Alexandria was born. Ewa Effiom takes this founding myth as the opening move in an essay that tracks its replication across centuries and geographies: London under Thatcher, cities built as monuments to deregulation, architects telling themselves they could fix the world one lineweight at a time. The urban grid that promises autonomy, she argues, has a habit of delivering its opposite, shrouded in the rhetoric of order and beauty, complicit in the absorption of capitalist surplus. Three wayward loaves copying homework from an older child, ignoring their mistakes. When you ultimately understand this intent, a lot of the mysteries of the contemporary begin to unravel.

@ewaeffiom   Superposition Workout - 2023

Guest edited by @freekpersyn

Published and edited by @leobettinioberkalmsteiner @tiborbielicky @maxcreasy @ellenaehrl @itsnikikim

Art direction and design by @daly_lyon taken in London, United Kingdom by @superposition.global

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a month ago

DAVID KLEMMER  In 1835, William Henry Fox Talbot produced the oldest known photographic negative. Six years later, the calotype process opened the way for serial duplication. One hundred and fifty years on, growing up in the 1990s alongside the first home computers — 256 colours, pixelated bitmaps — David Klemmer developed an obsession with the binary, with computation, with digital space. Where cardboard models built at late-night hours frustrated, the mathematical precision of computed models offered clarity and control, becoming the foundation for his dual practice as architect and image maker. A digital model, in his terms, is a virtual construction site: all architectonic components executed according to their real-world values, the anatomy of structure and space validated polygon by polygon. Rendered as colour-inverted negatives, these models shed their legibility and gain something else — an abstract, almost photographic quality that speaks to their nature as development, as progress, as digital promise for a possible reality.

@studiodavidklemmer

Superposition Workout - 2023

Guest edited by @freekpersyn
Published by @leobettinioberkalmsteiner @tiborbielicky @maxcreasy @ellenaehrl @itsnikikim

Art direction and design by @daly_lyon taken in Zürich, Switzerland by @superposition.global

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2 months ago

LIVING OUTSIDE

Photographs by Max Creasy

Notes by Leonidas Trampoukis, Chioma Ebinama, Konstantinos Pantazis and Marianna Rentzou, Natassa Dourida

Athens sits at the tip between east and west, carrying all the connotations that suggests: order and disorder, planned and improvised, modern and traditional. For the second issue of Superposition, five contributors were invited to annotate Max Creasy’s photographs of the city with their own image footnotes: brief, associative, personal. The result is less a portrait of Athens than a mental map: a network of observations tracing the Polykatoikia’s hybrid logic, the sound of cicadas stopping at midday in Hydra, the steel lattices over translucent pattern glass doors found all over the city, a car park that would never be a playground. Serenity. Freedom. Lost Athens. Between these one-word meditations and longer reflections on craft, fabrication, and urban typology, a city emerges — generous, layered, and still very much alive outside.

@maxcreasy @angelidakis @leonidastrampoukis @chiomaaaaaa @konstantinos.pantazis @mariannarentzou @pointsupreme @didadourida

Superposition Workout - 2023

Guest edited by @freekpersyn
Published by @leobettinioberkalmsteiner @tiborbielicky @maxcreasy @ellenaehrl @itsnikikim

Art direction and design by @daly_lyon taken in Athens, Greece by @superposition.global

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2 months ago

Quaders 278 – Image Fall Short
2026

For Quaderns‘ Issue 278, titled Image Fall Short, Superposition’s Tibor Bielicky, Ellena Ehrl, and Dominic Kim contributed to the „What are you looking at?“ series, offering annotations on three publications the editors currently value: the current issue (n°9) of @accattone_magazine Beverly Buchanan – Marsh Ruins by Amelia Groom, published as part of @afterallresearch One Work book series, and Lewis Baltz’s Rule Without Exception / Only Exception, published by @steidlverlag  
Superposition’s Max Creasy was selected as one of ten photographers to survey Catalunya. “Their foreign gazes uncover things familiarity prevents us from noticing and decentre well-established accounts of the spaces we inhabit“  w/ @quaderns @urtzigrau @guille_pik @samsonossedryver_studio @amalvarezg @albertfuentes1111 @coacatalunya @centreobertarquitectura @tiborbielicky @maxcreasy @ellenaehrl @itsnikikim taken in Barcelona by @superposition.global

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3 months ago

51N4E × OTTO LASKE — INSERT with OK-RM and guest editor Freek Persyn
 A 32-page experimental insert developed together with OK-RM, confronting the work of Brussels-based 51N4E — an architectural practice invested in urban and social transformation — with that of social scientist Otto Laske. Rather than documenting form, it asks what agency architectural form has. Going through his 28 dialectical thought forms means starting with context and moving over process and relationship towards transformation. The transfer from social sciences to architecture here doubles as an invitation to think with complexity and act with compassion. The insert functions as a bridging apparatus between guest editor Freek Persyn’s practice and the teaching at the NEWROPE Chair of Architecture and Urban Transformation at ETH Zurich. In a Special Edition developed for NEWROPE, the insert is enlarged by a so-called educational frame that adds an additional layer of annotations. For Superposition, this frame is cut to match the publication’s size, leaving only the cut marks as residue — a trace of a larger publication that was once there. Initially a collaborative experiment between Superposition and its guest editor to expand beyond the traditional boundaries of publishing, Persyn finalised the insert in a takeover, asking the editorial board to trust the experiment and editing it completely independent together with OK-RM. The investigation was led by Freek Persyn and produced together with Ellena Ehrl, Tibor Bielicky, Rory McGrath, and Barnaby Mills.

@freekpersyn @51n4e @newrope.world @okrm_london

Superposition Workout - 2023

Guest edited by @freekpersyn

Published and edited by @leobettinioberkalmsteiner @tiborbielicky @maxcreasy @ellenaehrl @itsnikikim

Art direction and design by @daly_lyon taken in Brussels, Belgium by @superposition.global

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5 months ago

Grace Prince - INITIAL SENSATIONS TO THE END RESULT

In his essay on Cy Twombly, Roland Barthes describes gesture as a „surplus of an action.“ Working within the theme of WORKOUT, designer Grace Prince pursues a related question: what would a surplus of a fragile action look like within design — and why does she, as a designer, crave to bring fragility into function? Her answer reaches back to childhood, to a nostalgia for breaking and reconstructing objects as a way of learning. As children, we are acutely sensitive to materiality: we learn the difference between throwing and placing, dragging and lifting, falling and balancing. These initial encounters are transient and rare — moments of material truth. It is from this principle of the rare that Prince’s work draws its perseverance, the drive to encapsulate use within a gestural assembly. Like first love, fleeting, and nothing quite as authentic.

@grace____prince

Superposition Workout - 2023

Guest edited by @freekpersyn

Published and edited by @leobettinioberkalmsteiner @tiborbielicky @maxcreasy @ellenaehrl @itsnikikim

Art direction and design by @daly_lyon taken in Zürich, Switzerland by @superposition.global

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5 months ago

Fredi Fischli & Niels Olsen - ONE-MAN? OFFICE: THREE BUILDINGS BY PAUL TITTEL
Photos by Tibor Bielicky

How is the afterlife of Swiss modernism going? Belonging to the unknown post-war architects working in Zurich, Paul Tittel operated a one-man office whose legacy was long overshadowed by widely published contemporaries such as Pierre Zoelly, Eduard Neuenschwander, and Theo Hotz. Yet his small built oeuvre — three realised projects in Zurich — rewards close attention. The Kantonsschule Stadelhofen impresses with its effortless attitude: an angled grid of glass and concrete volumes cut into the steep terrain above Calatrava’s train station, offering intimate hidden spaces alongside a connecting public pathway. A bus stop and post office at Burgwies, partly demolished and only remembered through archival photographs, transformed a non-place at the edge of central Zurich into something habitable through subtle intervention. A former mail-order company in Hottingen, now housing several architecture offices, captivates with its radical simplicity — a gleaming aluminium façade ribboned by large windows and fragile metallic shutters, as if the modernist box were dressed in a sheer garment. Still today, fragments of his projects survive like ruins in the midst of the real estate onslaught, serving as quiet meeting spaces for a diverse community.

@fredi_niels_official @tiborbielicky @gta_archive_ethz

Superposition Workout - 2023

Guest edited by @freekpersyn

Published and edited by @leobettinioberkalmsteiner @tiborbielicky @maxcreasy @ellenaehrl @itsnikikim

Art direction and design by @daly_lyon taken in Zürich, Switzerland by @superposition.global

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5 months ago

Johnston Marklee, MOS, Ehrl Bielicky - ON PRACTICE

Partnerships in architecture are a standard model found everywhere. Sharing expertise and experience, having more workforce to distribute work and complementing skills all favour close and long-lasting collaborations. Therefore, the often close work relationship needs a stable foundation of trust and mutual validation and the ability to credit and respect each other. In a trio-partnership roundtable-discussion end of January 2023, Sharon Johnston and Mark Lee of Los Angeles-based office Johnston Marklee, Hilary Sample and Michael Meredith of MOS
from New York, as well as Ellena Ehrl and Tibor Bielicky from Ehrl Bielicky in Zurich, openly discussed partnerships, collaboration and the future of the architecture office.

@johnstonmarklee @mmmosarchitects @ehrlbielicky

Superposition Workout - 2023 taken in USA by @superposition.global

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2 years ago

OK-RM (Oliver Knight and Rory McGrath) in conversation with Wayne Daly

As part of guest editor Freek Persyn’s ecosystem, Superposition’s Wayne Daly speaks with OK-RM about projects and strategies in connection to 51N4E, Newrope and beyond. OK-RM , a design studio founded by Oliver Knight and Rory McGrath, began collaborating with architect Persyn in 2018 during a project in Brussels called ‘You Are Here’. This initiative involved various architects and urbanists discussing the future of lowland Europe. Their partnership is built on a conversational and open-minded approach to design, which Persyn encapsulates as ‘design-in-dialogue’. They focus on both conceptual and practical methodologies, emphasizing the development of tools and rules to guide their projects.

Key collaborative projects include Newrope, Persyn’s studio at ETH founded in 2019, which functions as a model of an architecture school, and 51N4E, a model of an architecture practice as platform. These projects operate on levels of presentation (tools) and representation (what the tools achieve), embodying speculative ways of teaching and practicing design. OK-RM employs ‘performative pragmatism’, a blend of analytical precision and creative expression, a trait they admire in Belgian design practices.

Their work spans various scales and contexts, from small publications to large exhibitions. They aim to break visual identity out of traditional graphic design, integrating scenography, choreography, and theatrical settings. This approach allows them to question and redefine design’s role and presentation, creating contexts that enable fluid and liberated design processes.

@okrm_london @okofokrm @rmofokrm @daly_lyon @51n4e @newrope.world @freekpersyn

Superposition Workout - 2023 taken in London, Unιted Kingdom by @superposition.global

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2 years ago

Schneider Türtscher & Arkitekt Jonas Løland - BODYBUILDING

For WORKOUT we connected two architectural practices, from Zurich and Oslo, focusing on collaboration. Despite differences in size, location, and longevity, knowing both practices for a long time and being in an ongoing conversation for years suggested they were ideal for this experimental feature. The process involved year-long dialogues through mails, encounters, and messages, culminating in a visual compendium combining their works. The framework used five athletic-inspired phases: WARMUP (early project phases), WORKOUT (project development methods), FETISHISATION (aesthetic evaluation), IMPULSES (complementary distractions), and STRETCHING (adaptation and flexibility). Both practices, Schneider Türtscher and Jonas Løland, explored their projects‘ contexts, merging traditional and innovative elements. Their collaboration emphasized accepting process traces, balancing digital and analogue methods, and recognizing the rigorous yet rewarding nature of architectural work.

@schneidertuertscher @j_loland

Superposition Workout - 2023 taken in Europe by @superposition.global

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2 years ago