DRAUßEN | Out-There: Landscape Architecture on Global Terrain
Exhibition Design at the Pinakothek der Moderne, Architekturmuseum der TU München, April- August 2017
DRAUẞEN | Out-There was the first exhibition at the Architekturmuseum der TU München dedicated entirely to landscape architecture. Through an immersive spatial experience, it sought to illuminate the evolving concepts, methods, and ambitions of the discipline while foregrounding its growing importance in addressing the environmental and societal challenges of the future.
How can the living and working practices of being Out-There in the landscape be captured through research and exhibition? With attentive observation and an exploratory mindset, the exhibition design emerged from questions of unfamiliarity, encounter, and entanglement across diverse contexts, as reflected in ten projects developed by landscape architecture institutes/ departments throughout Germany. Conceived as a form of fieldwork, the exhibition itself became an exploratory terrain where processes, experiments, and evidence structured a space of meandering and discovery.
The featured projects were presented as “action-offices” - taxonomic workstations that invited visitors to navigate materials, artefacts, and ideas much like astronauts embarking on missions into unfamiliar territories. The exhibition hall was deliberately darkened, allowing the work to appear as a constellation of illuminated points scattered across an open field. Landscape, after all, encompasses many worlds and hues beyond green.
Within this immersive dimness, moments of heightened attention and learning emerged through ten research projects conducted in places as diverse as Spain, China, Rwanda, and South America, revealing the complex interdependencies that connect cities and their surrounding environments, water cycles, ecological systems, and socio-cultural realities across both local and global scales.
Team: Silvia Benedito & Alexander Häusler (partners), Larissa Belcic, Lukas Ostermann.
Content and curation partners:
1) Undine Giseke Technische Universität Berlin, with Kathrin Wieck, Lucas Hövelmann, and David Aerni (curatorial team). Projects: Casablanca, Morocco; Kigali, Rwanda
2) Regine Keller and Johann-Christian Hannemann, Chair of Landscape Architecture and Public Space, Technische Universität München (Munich), with Ines Hoffmann, Laura Loewel, Felix Lüdicke, and Florian Rüger (curatorial team). Projects: Cañada Real Galiana, Spain; Onaville, Haiti
3) Jörg Rekittke, National University of Singapore (from July 2016, Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology) with Philip Paar and Yazid Ninsalam. Projects: Bali and Jakarta, Indonesia