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ROOF OF SHADOWS (#1, #2)
2014
Steel, varnish, concrete
240 x 225 x 120 cm each 


[Kay Walkowiak´s] works deal with Chandigarh, a city in the North of India which was designed on the drawing board by Le Corbusier, the city he built to create an adequate architecture for his modernistic utopia of a future kind of man. Chandigarh, literally: “The City Beautiful,” is the result of a utopia strictly relying on geometrical forms, in order to produce a social kind of architecture out of thin air, grounded on “the functional designs of technology and industry”. The buildings are oriented toward the “functionality of the machine,” to create a geometrical world order from the most simple platonic bodies which is in accordance with the spirit of its time—industrial production, functionality, and technology.
[...] Kay Walkowiak demonstrates the transience of such feasibility utopias, by establishing a relation between such utopias and the superiority of nature, by exposing them to the ravages of time.



Text: Arno Böhler, Vienna 2016
Photos: Studio Kay Walkowiak