Ideal Spaces Working Group

Ideal Spaces is an art and research project that aims to explore spaces of social and imaginative relevance.

“Since 2016 the Ideal Spaces Working Group (www.idealspaces.org) and its founder Ulrich Gehmann are associated partners to the department of Design. Going back to 2014 when the collaboration with Ulrich Gehmann and the department of Design started, the group has published several articles, made exhibitions and symposia in the context of the Venice Architectural Biennale, inter alias in the Italian Pavilion in 2021, in the State Museum of Architecture in Moscow, in Miami and at other places. Together with Michael Johansson, one focus of the group’s activities is on research on gestalt, space, and imagination.”

The work is about social dreaming and imagination, expressed in 'ideal' spaces with their impacts on architecture, art, and human hopes. With a look at recent conditions, we need to re-address the topic of ideal spaces more than ever. In these respects, ideal spaces are not confined to utopian ones in the sense of a dream never to be fulfilled; instead, such spaces can get very practical, and we are working on that. Today, the majority of human beings live in urban agglomerations which are far away from being 'ideal' but chaotic, accompanied by an actual destruction of space unprecedented in history. In parallel, never before so many technical possibilities of imagining spaces existed, allowing for escape into worlds of fantasy, dream and play. Space is lost and at the same time multiplied in manifold ways. But human beings need space as concrete places they can actually belong to, and they need community. Issues which have to be settled, urgently.

For achieving this, the working group proceeds in three directions or lines of activity: we have practical projects, organize exhibitions and arrange symposia. Exhibitions and symposia are closely linked with each other so that their topics develop mutually. And they result in practical projects.