The origins of our money go back to the exchange of precious metals for goods. Our paper money is based on gold, a system that likely began in China around the year 1000, but was already abolished by 1402, as the Emperor began printing much more paper money than they had gold in their possession. Today, we have a financial system that is based on credit, as in ancient China. A credit that it is better to never pay. Daily currency transactions reach a total of approximately 3,000 billion US dollars, which is backed by the around (only) 160,000 tons of worldwide gold reserves. This is a volume equivalent to about 8,000 cubic meters, or a cube with sides of about 20 meters. To visualize this startling and fascinating state of affairs, we have designed an illustrative form: A nugget with a volume of 8,000 cubic meters. As the Deutsche Bank declined to place this visualization of a nugget at their headquarters in Frankfurt am Main, we have selected the public square in front of the Austrian National Bank in Vienna to draw attention to the remarkable and noteworthy disparity between real values and the inflated financial markets.
Location: Otto-Wagner-Platz (Ostarrichipark), 1090 Vienna
Draft: 2011 – volume: 8000m³
Design team: Lukas Göbl, Oliver Ulrich
In contrast to standard architectural productions, which are generally oriented to reality, the “City of Beautiful Bodies” is an ongoing drawing project dedicated to utopia and presenting a city of fantasy. “No day without a line,” Paul Klee’s motto is given a special translation and interpretation in the large-scale drawings of the City of Beautiful Bodies (Vol. I – IV so far) by Lukas Göbl. Meters of paper always lay ready in the office, offering plenty of room for the formulation, the making visible – simply put, the drawing of these experimental thoughts. The sole governing factor is artistic creativity, channeled into sounding out the balance of fiction and pragmatism in an architectural translation. Fantastic constructs, miraculous buildings, and gigantic castles in the air are given shape, allowing three-dimensional realities to emerge. Organic and technoid shapes overlap one another and generate a scenario that borrows from the bionic. Consisting of millions of lines and produced in the most diverse moods and states of emotion, the drawings bear witness to spontanaeity and desire for immediate expression. Analogue and digital media are, corresponding to the workday world of the site, sequentially overlayed to conform to an accentuated visual grammar. Momentary impressions and events as well as current occasions find entry into this total work of art. In the City of Beautiful Bodies, a journey to the hitherto undiscovered boundaries of one’s own fantasy becomes manifest. The evidence of an architectural liminal experience, a passionate and even arduous struggle and the testing of one’s own potential finds physical form here. The City of Beautiful Bodies permits itself to exist in the form of drawings on no occasion, and for no purpose, totally separate from architectural creation.
