BUILDERS’ ROOM | Hello Wood

Concept and realization: Hello Wood

 

The Hello Wood Studio’s installation in the side hall of the 2nd National Salon of Architecture gives an interactive demonstration of what we do throughout the year: it attempts to make architecture more visible and bring it closer to the person on the street. The installation aims to encourage visitors to take part in manual, physical activity, and give them an opportunity to interact by expressing their general opinions in the form of data elicited in response to Hungarian architecture. The symbolic architectural machinery constructed in the hall is essentially a playground that gives visitors hands-on experience of the stages in a linear process, enabling them to deepen their thinking about architecture, while relying on them as collaborators in the creation of an outdoor installation that is the end product of the process. The installation is coded at several levels and in several layers; each and every element has a special meaning.

The individual stations of the “architecture machinery”:

  1. 1. Lumber Yard – The sorting criteria, colours and shades of the strips of wood to be used are based on the distribution of participants by age-group, as well as the ratio of architects to laypersons among the visitors.
  2. Sawmill / Processing Plant – At the next workstation, with the help of an on-site professional assistant, visitors can cut the chosen wood to a size that corresponds to how ‘cool’ they think Hungarian architecture is.
  3. Marking / Giving Answers – At the following workstation, visitors are given an opportunity and space to mark, on the sawn-off piece of wood, the answer to a predetermined, fun, multiple choice question.
  4. Warehouse / Sorting Depot – the last workstation is for the storage of the sawn-off wooden strips bearing the answers given at the previous workstation. The wooden strips piled up here, of various colours and sizes, will be used as the raw material for outdoor installations that will be sited in the area surrounding the Kunsthalle building for the duration of the main exhibition.