Architecture

The Unbearable Lightness of Being
by Mésarchitectures

8 December 2009

Architect Didier Fiuza Faustino of Paris studio Mésarchitectures has installed a pair of swing seats on a billboard frame as part of the Shenzhen & Hong Kong bi-city Biennale of Urbanism/Architecture in China this week.

Called The Unbearable Lightness of Being, the project is conceived as a mobile installation and can be erected around an existing billboard.

The biennale began on Sunday 6 December and continues until 23 January 2010.

Photographs by Sun Xiaoxi, courtesy of Approach Architecture Studio.

Here’s some more information from Mésarchitectures:

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THE UNBEARABLE LIGHTNESS OF BEING (Nesnesitelná lehkost bytí)

SPECIFICITY
Urban reanimation device

PURPOSE

The Unbearable Lightness of Being responds to the society of materialism where individual desires seems to be prevailing over all.

This piece of urban furniture, by being nomad, allows the reactivation of different public spaces. It enables inhabitants to reappropriate fragments of their city. They will both escape and dominate public space through a game of equilibrium and desequilibrium.

By playing this “risky” game, and testing their own limits, two people can experience together a new perception of space, void, lightness and recover an awarness of the physical world.

This hybrid object, meaningfull only through the body, being all at once physical and social may be a tool for a collective experience of fragility.

MATERIAL

Billboard and swings mix , steel ladder, steel lattice platform, protective nets on steel structure, waterproof floodlights.
(Can be set up on existing billboard)