Lecture no 11 // Benedict Tonon - Architecture: One work - one world

An evening with Benedict Tonon and Prof. Claus Baldus in
conversation on the interplay between interpretation and work

Thursday, June 15, 2023, 6 p.m.

Exhibition until June 23, 2023

Benedict Tonon is considered an example of modernism turned reflective. In two books recently published by Zurich-based publishing house Park Books, the architect—long a professor at the Berlin University of the Arts—presents one of the results of this reflexivity in his art theory volume Architektur – eine hermeneutische Kunst. Ereignis, Deutung, Sinn (Architecture—A Hermeneutic Art: Occurrence, Interpretation, Meaning), while the publication Benedict Tonon. Brücken, Häuser, Orte (Benedict Tonon: Bridges, Houses, Places) provides a clear background for the ideas of the first.

Together, the two volumes reflect Tonon’s interest in a new joining of theory and practice as a tool for design. Dealing with a multitude of calculable and identifiable logics of possible states of being challenges designers to practice an art of interpretation and understanding (hermeneutic techniques) in specific situations. Each work becomes an aesthetic production event involving the development of an idea and the discovery of a form. The idiosyncrasy of this work is the crux of Tonon’s thinking and also the starting point for his many very special buildings and projects. Each new design is a testimony of decisiveness in an interplay of time and place and is unique: one work—one world.