architecture as skin

In order to meet the contemporary condition’s challenges of a complex and multi-layered society we propose, instead of an architectural object, an architectural interface. As a surface of contact and exchange it mediates and translates, like a biological skin, between different emvironments. The skin enables thereby a dynamic coexistence and mediation between differences.

Many of our clients find themselves nowadays in a situation where the development of a building or a new city is needed which has to react simultaneously to many different, and often contradicting, parameters in both its construction and its operation. Contrary to a container-like and often isolated object, an interface provides a multidirectional inclusion of different worlds. Our approach advocates hence the following dictums:

• Generating value through flexible solutions at the interface between different milieus.

   

• Sustainability as integrated Dynamism.

   

• Blending differences as an urban and socio-economic strategy
  
  

As an interdisciplinary architecture practice, we hence develop and design integral buildings and cities as multimodal interfaces that mediate between different spheres and thereby facilitating an adaptive and resilient coexistence of differences.

Based on a precise analysis of the project’s economic, urban, socio-cultural and ecological parameters we develop the architectural interface, as a “built skin” or in other words as a holistic “organ of mediation”. Accordingly, we like our designs to respond to their surroundings and contexts while project-related weaknesses are transformed into identity-establishing assets. Our architecture emerges therefore as a proactive architecture which seeks to provide a socio-economic and an ecological added value for our clients.

Paint advocates a fictional urbanism and a poetic realism in which the intertwining of figuration and abstraction as well as pragmatism and fiction generate that unsuspected added value while enabling a dynamic, polymorphic urban and socio-cultural identity.

Different conventional urban programs such as living, working, education, production, entertainment, shopping, energy production, ecology and mobility are therefore being interwoven into a new structural fabric. In other words, they are put into a novel structural relation to each other. Analogously classical architectural elements such as floor, wall, ceiling, roof, lightning, façade, window, stair, elevator and ramp are re-intertwined and thereby structurally remodulated.

Our architectural interfaces are hence living membranes; urban fictions; walkable, tangible and built paintings that invite their users to participate in their creation and transformation.

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Mina Yaney (“Fragments of the Skin Manifesto”, 2020)